


Wet Dog

by ToEditIsHuman



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1990s, Animagus, Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Canon Reinterpretation, Dog - Freeform, Gen, Grief, Headcanon, Mental Health Issues, No Romantic Focus, Non-Sexual, Peter Pettigrew - Freeform, Remus in Hiding, Revenge, Sirius Held Hostage, Sirius on the run, Starvation, Werewolf Discrimination, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-09-11 07:18:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 34,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8965954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToEditIsHuman/pseuds/ToEditIsHuman
Summary: In the middle of one night in the summer of 1993, a dog crawls out of the sea. It is starving, desperate, and losing its sanity when it remembers an old friend - and decides to try and reclaim something of its past.Set at the beginning of PoA after Sirius' escape. This story mostly fits with canon but imagines a somewhat different series of events between his escape and arriving at Hogwarts.





	1. Chapter 1

### Prologue

 

Whatever could be called the earliest hour was upon the hard eastern shore, when nothing wanted to move for the sake of the dark. That sort of hour, grim and dead, lasted an age if you were the sort of thing that crawled around in it. Most things gladly slept through it. The beach was almost frozen, hard and still even at the height of summer, and a chilled wind rolled over it without bringing any movement to the horizon.

But as if out of a nightmare something was crawling, dragging itself on watery legs out of the sea – though it was only a dog, black and bitten and wasted. It was panting heavy silver mist as at last it pulled free of the water, and it found when its feet collapsed into rocky sand that the earth had fallen over its head, and it could not hold it up. In that panicked instant it thought about black things and whined, growled for itself to get up, half-dreaming that it was sinking into mist; but in a moment its white eyes opened and suddenly it realised it was alive, it wouldn’t be swallowed or swept away, and it wouldn’t have to swim anymore. Suddenly it felt the joyous relief of the whole sea leaving its back, wet as it was, and with its strength gone it fell hard onto the sand.

A bird’s voice woke it again when things that were light and living began to raise their heads. This thing did, and before it looked it smelled, as if for the first time – and when it scented sea and air and openness everywhere about it, the dog almost forgot it was a dog, almost remembered a complete explosion of happiness in some other creature’s heart that would have made it sob. But the dog couldn’t quite feel such things, and when it opened its eyes it thought of little again, only sensing the need to stand – which it did, painfully but hurriedly – and then the absolute necessity which was to move. It couldn’t feel the sun but it knew it was time to move; its mission was to run, and with all of its strength, its desperate raging animal hunger, it had to hunt. For crawling through its heavy coat, claws scratching its fleshless skin, it could feel the rat, and with a hoarse snarl it tried in vain to shake it off.

The dog was too hungry to think very clearly, and as it wandered over the beach its thoughts were mostly flashes, hallucinatory images of what it wanted. A couple of times it snapped its head in the direction of a dark thing it thought it saw, but as wretched as it was another part of it knew with awful certainty that it would have to go a long way to find what it was after. And the dog seemed to realise when it came to the steps, itching with sand and shivering, that it could only go one way at the top, and it couldn’t choose it at random.

With aching precision it climbed the stone steps; then, finding nothing but a dim, dirty pavement, it stopped and looked behind itself to the sprawl of the sea. It stared for a long time, and barely twitched until the first glimmer of the sun came upon the water. Seeing this, it didn’t hesitate before turning and walking left, thoughts once again quite grey. Limping on one hind leg, dry tongue panting as it walked, still its only choice was to move – so it wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t think, wouldn’t find that it couldn’t move any more and die after being half dead for so long that it couldn’t remember living… after half killing itself for the most pitiful chance of getting what he wanted with a slavering thirst, no matter if it did kill him… it…

Somehow like that the dog pushed itself on for days. It followed the coast, or the smell of it, for innumerable miles. Sometimes it leapt at pigeons, but it was too weak to reach and only twisted its legs more, and then it would settle for eating the things tourists threw away. Its fur grew damp and things bit and itched everywhere, and its skin bled when it scratched. When it saw people, it didn’t stop except to hide, and at other dogs it whimpered and fled before they could bark. It didn’t allow itself to be distracted, concentrating only on walking in the direction it hoped would take it somewhere it knew. As it dragged its bony legs along and growled in its agonised determination, it thought like a dog, and never thought to stop, to look around. It didn’t know where it was, when or why – it didn’t know itself except that it was black, it was hungry, and it was nearly mad.

One day (no more than a week could have passed) the dog was dizzy and panting as it sat in an alley behind a dry cleaner’s, looking intently at something on the ground. It had been forced to stray from the shore some time ago by the crowds, and for the first time it had wandered into the heart of a town, made light-headed by hunger and resigned at last to find something more than soggy chips to eat. But for perhaps the first time its attention had been roused by something else as it walked through the alley – in this case the front page of a local newspaper – and when it saw this it stopped quite suddenly. Now it sat and stared at the page, almost as if it were reading it.

Though dated a few days ago, the dog was nevertheless captivated by the news, and most of all by the picture accompanying it. The dead-eyed face did not move on the page, but it held the dog’s gaze readily. As the dog looked it lowered its ears, dropped its limp tail, even seemed to breathe less in its fear. The picture was in fact over a decade old, and the dog began to feel sick looking at it, recognising it and loathing it for its humanity even as it looked back with that hateful expression. But when it forced itself to look away its eye was caught instead by the bold words printed above it – ‘SEARCH FOR ESCAPED MURDERER CONTINUES’ – and at once it was on its feet and growling as if pursuers had suddenly surrounded it, though it saw with watering eyes that it was quite alone in the alley. Even so, it knew it had to run.

That night the dog curled itself inside a phone box, hiding from the rain, and dreamed about rats. It dreamed of pouncing, ripping the evil thing open – but somewhere in its animal mind the image of that face surfaced. Though it still slept and twitched as a dog it began to think and dream like something else, though still a ragged and deathlike thing. Nevertheless, after days of prowling in the gutters, reason began to creep into its head for the first time. Unconscious of the pain and hunger which drove it on desperately, it could think almost rationally about what it wanted, and in this state it began to feel quite vividly that it was doomed in this venture. So little of it existed as it was – what would be left at the end of this, if it was alive at all? Just a starving, snarling black dog, crawling through the streets. It couldn’t think how it was worth it to keep living for the sake of that future.

But in its future there was very little choice. In hunting the only thing it wanted, the dog had found itself nearly helpless alone, and it could not hope to survive much longer. And though it only vaguely knew where it was, it did know where it was going, and it was a long, dangerous journey on its aching feet. The swimming alone had almost killed it, but it had kept going with the thought of land, and the prey which awaited it. Now, it could not keep going, almost blindly, on that thought alone. It needed something else to drive it, the thought of something other than itself and that rat.

Amongst its feverish dreams another face arose, and another and another – old faces, half forgotten but somehow retained after so long. And one in particular began to dominate its thoughts, one which didn’t frighten it but actually offered it a glimpse of warmth. It didn’t know how it could be done, but with that face in mind the dog realised it possessed something other than mad rage to drive its efforts. The newspaper still haunted the dog, but it had reminded it of the importance of using its head over its teeth.

There was no small risk in this, but the dog didn’t care for itself – only that it could live long enough to tear into the little piece of shit that had scurried away and left so much carnage lying behind it. What had happened to him – that was, to the dog – was the least of it, and yet for that alone he wanted to skin the bastard, he wanted to put his dear friend through a fraction of what he had been subjected to day after day as he slowly shrank to almost nothing, less than human – a beast, a numb thing – a dog. In its sleep the dog shook and whined.

But when it finally woke in the drizzling half-light, its thoughts were less like a dog’s than ever. It lifted its head, knowing it needed to think clearly for a while – and when it sat back against the filthy glass wall of the phone box and slowly pushed a hand through long, thick, grimy hair, it realised; he was no longer a dog. He barely knew who he was but seeing pale skin on his palms instead of dark hair brought a part of him back that he hadn’t known in twelve years. He owned himself again; his fate was his to choose.

At once his mind was a flood with everything it was possible to think and feel, and he found himself baring his teeth in an awful kind of grin because it had been so long since he had felt anything close to hope, or happiness, or curiosity or exhilaration or love. It all came upon him like a first breath, even crushed inside the phone box, because the dog could not feel those things, and to his astonishment he found he still could – and despite everything he was laughing hysterically as heavy tears blinded him because he had never thought he would ever be free, or whatever he was, again.

And yet he fought the urge to scream in his frustration and despair, swollen out of proportion of what he had felt inside the dog’s head, because he was nothing of what he used to be – thanks to the rat. His only choice _was_ to hunt it, he could not live for anything else in the state he was in. His joy was suffused with maddening hate, a delirious bloody rage which was his only keepsake from his imprisonment. And he would not let it go now – but even through the red haze he retained the sense of a man, and for perhaps the first time since pulling himself ashore he thought about the people other than himself to whom he owed the selfish revenge he craved.

It was a shock to find the same ache when he thought about them, the same loyalty and love, despite years of corrosive loneliness. In fact it was an enormous relief that he was not warped beyond retaining that outrage and grief he had long felt on their behalf – indeed he still remembered the initial realisation, the sensation of being violently disembowelled which hit him half a second after he had learned what had happened. His head twitched as he remembered, as if he was still reeling from the news. And because of that he knew he was not a monster or an animal. He scratched his neck absently, feeling the rat’s teeth gnawing. He could not let it go, but there may be a better way. He would not lose himself entirely for the sake of that scum.

When he left the phone box he walked on four legs, but this time the dog remembered who he was, and he knew where he was going. He was no less determined than before, yet the weight on his feet and the emptiness of his whole body was less of a strain now that he was thinking of those who were alive, and not only something that would soon be dead at his feet.


	2. Chapter 2

An undecided evening hour in the last full week of August saw pale skies and a spitting shower of rain fall over the grimy northern suburb. Terraces, high-fenced parks and the odd office complex, mostly brown and grey leftovers from the Seventies but quite suiting the Nineties so far. Amongst these the boarding house didn’t stand out, unremarkable even for its disreputable inhabitants since they mostly hid away with whichever was their particular vice.

One man, walking back with his shopping, struck a usual solitary figure with his eyes on his feet and his damp hair almost covering his eyes. He wasn’t quite aware of walking at all; his legs followed the path and he thought in his deeply distracted way all the way to the back door of the boarding house. There was nothing to catch the eye about the building’s rear, or the stairwell behind the stiff and squeaking door, and the man paid them no mind as he passed through. He felt vaguely the weight of the bag in his arms, and was dimly aware that he was sniffing and swallowing to clear his throat after walking in the rain, but he was quite isolated in his thoughts and the physical world made little impression on them.

There was no need for conscious thought regarding his brewing illness; the anxiety was an instinctive reflex, by now second-nature, as he knew its cause with all certainty and dread. But since it rarely left him he did not let it occupy his mind any more than the colourless walls as he mounted the stairs. This creeping up of illness would be the last, he hoped, at least for a while, but even at the back of his mind it nevertheless served to put him ill at ease.

By the time he reached the long, cold landing, from which ten or so doors opened onto cold rooms, he was tired enough to close his eyes and sleep the moment he got off his feet. Before he had turned towards the far end of the corridor he could feel his eyes already struggling to focus, his shoulders and his back and his legs and his arms quite ready to drop the weight of almost forty-eight hours. But he had to reach his room first – and dazed as he was he did not quite notice at first what it was that was taking up the corner by his door, though he saw the dense black in the corner of his eye as soon as he gained the last stair. Mind blank, he took another tentative step, wondering about parcels and bags of rubbish. But no, it was twitching, or breathing – what on earth – was it a dog?

There was no pause; in the spark of a moment it took for the bag to break open on the floor he had reached into his coat and pulled out something long and narrow with a force that wrenched every muscle in his arm. He didn’t feel it, however, through the powerful strain of directing the sharp bit of wood at the black dog that was curled tightly in the corner. He didn’t flinch at the sound of oranges rolling over the top step and hitting the stairs one by one; out of his drowsy slump he was suddenly poised, and though his left hand shook with the shock of adrenaline, his right was steady, his firm grip on his wand belying completely the anger and terror in his face.

The dog didn’t stir. The man held his pose defiantly, but the initial shock which had spun him into action was lessening as he took the time to look better at his target. The dog was asleep, or unconscious; in fact it hardly seemed alive except for the slow rise and fall of its breaths. Its fur was filthy, ragged and patchy in places, and where there was bare skin it seemed to grow directly out of the bone beneath it. The thing was half starved and monstrous, but far from feeling relief that he had stumbled across it in a vulnerable position, the man knew – it was a horrible, stomach-twisting pain to think about – he knew it would be desperate, entirely reckless, once it was roused.

So he stood at the ready, briefly turning his head to check the doors around him. What was he going to do if it suddenly woke up? Stun it – or worse – or just hold it there with his outstretched wand, and hope it would understand it was cornered? For a moment he wondered how quickly he could run outside and call for help – gods, he couldn’t even move, he couldn’t go running to _them_ – it shamed him but he knew he couldn’t do it. For reasons both cowardly and selfish, he wouldn’t put this in the hands of the damned ministry authorities.

He stepped over the remains of his shopping and carefully walked half the length of the corridor. His right arm never faltered; by now he had almost forgotten he was still holding it out. As he approached, the smell that came off the thing grew like an aura, wet and filthy with rubbish. When he stopped he and the dog were still a few feet apart, but he had only stood there a second when the dog growled in its sleep, and he jerked backwards in shock. Even though it still didn’t open its eyes the man felt himself shaking quite severely, not only in fear but in anger, at himself as well as the dog. He shouldn’t be afraid, not when he had the power to kill it while it slept, but it was the fact that it appeared so harmless, so pathetic, that frightened him, knowing what it really was.

The man was forced to decide; if he waited for it to come round, he might lose the advantage of taking it by surprise. But if he forced it to wake up it might attack before it even saw him. Yet he had to consider that it had sat down in front of his door to wait for him – he couldn’t imagine another possibility – and as such it had deliberately made itself open to attack. If it saw him – if it recognised him – would it attack, or even try to defend itself? It could not be waiting to ambush him here, in this condition. He brushed his eyes with the back of his left hand, trying to retain the anger which was keeping his wand in the air – but he couldn’t continue the thought and remain determined. If he allowed himself that weakness he might easily regret it.

“You. Black.” He swallowed, eyes watering. “Wake up.” He was thankful his voice didn’t break as he spoke his command. The dog’s ears fluttered slightly but still it lay there like a dead weight. By now his frustration was at a peak and at all costs he wanted the thing to look at him. Taking another step, he was careful to position the tip of his wand over the creature’s head.

“Black! Wake up!”

He had no choice but to roar, straining his already hoarse throat. Almost immediately the dog’s head reeled, its eyes flickering and fighting against sleep.

“Black.” He spat as he said the name for a third time. “Wake up and show your face.”

There was no doubt now – the dog was looking at him through its heavy, pale eyes. For a moment it didn’t seem to see him, however, and it blinked and made the groaning effort to raise its head. But very quickly the man was certain it met his eyes deliberately, and the shock of meeting them was almost as much as he had felt when he first saw it there and recognised it with a horrible certainty. If he had ever had any doubt, it was utterly devastated now.

He heard the dog give a low whine, saw its eyes almost close themselves once more – it was a pitiful sight, barely keeping up its head. But when the dog saw what was being held out towards it, it pushed the front half of its hollow body away from the floor with its paws and slumped against the wall, dazed once more. The man was so frightened to see it move that he almost obeyed the urge to stun it – but of course he knew he wouldn’t. The dog was not about to leap up and tear out his throat – unless of course it was acting, and waiting until he let down his guard.

“Look at me like a man,” he said at last, feeling sick and hearing it in his voice. The dog lowered its head again and he found he had lost his patience. “Show your face or I’ll make you.” He was forced to squint as his eyes slowly grew clouded, and on opening his mouth he found he didn’t have the energy to keep up the threatening exterior. In a second the tough façade dropped off him, and he let a harsh shiver run through the bones of his back as he shrunk, and grimaced against a burn in his throat. Still, he didn’t lower his arm. “Please – look at me, you owe me that.”

He barely felt the thin tears which quickly spilled over and dried. He was practiced at being separate from his emotions but this had taken him completely off guard – how foolish had he been not to expect it? What had he thought – that he would never come for him because –

The thought was interrupted by a rustling at his feet. He looked, and the dog was gone, replaced by grey rags, bones, black hair, and dull grey eyes that despite their fatigue were undeniably human. Then the smell of the man arrived, and the man standing felt it immediately in his throat, the thick, solid stench of sweat and every other kind of filth – even, somehow, of seawater. But he lost his breath by looking; the man at his feet didn’t, or couldn’t, return his stricken gaze. In fact he seemed to have difficulty looking at all, almost gasping with the effort of holding himself upright. He was slightly taken aback to hear the man growling under his breath, but he realised quickly that it was the sound of his empty stomach.

What disturbed him most was that even amongst his wasted appearance, he recognised the man at once. It terrified him because he could not believe he was the same man he had ever known – though surely he had never known him, he couldn’t have done. So when the man on the floor finally found the strength to meet his eye, the one standing felt somehow at his mercy, fearing and mistrusting everything about him. He was impotent even as he held a wand to his head, and he did not doubt that the other could see that clearly.

Their long, silent stalemate was at last broken by a breath of a voice – awful, because it was the ghost of one he knew.

“Remus – you’re not going to – it’s hardly a fair fight.”

It was true – but although there was some trepidation in his eyes he didn’t say it with concern. At the same time there was no insolence, nothing close to mocking which Remus (hearing the other speak his name set a fire up his back) could seize upon in his anger. Instead he settled for calmly pointing out his authority.

“This isn’t a fight. You can’t possibly fight.”

“No. Course not.” He slipped a few inches down the wall but he held up his head, and the more he looked at the man looming over him, the more he seemed to disbelieve he was there. “God – I didn’t recognise you. For some reason I thought you’d still be twenty years old.”

It was plain to see he was suffering, even slumped on the ground. He was little more than a corpse to look at, and he breathed like someone exhausted, on the edge of panic. He’d been living like a stray for weeks, of course, and Remus could hardly see how he was still alive; it chilled him to the core to think for what purpose he might have forced himself to survive.

“How did you find me – and why – why are you here?”


	3. Chapter 3

From his undignified seat on the floor, Sirius Black bared his teeth. If Remus couldn’t tell he was in pain, he might have thought he was trying to smile. But as much he hated him for so many reasons, Remus couldn’t see anything about him that would suggest he was insane, which in lieu of a better explanation he had hoped for a long time was the case. Perhaps he was half out of his mind with hunger on top of twelve years’ worth of neglect and isolation, but he could not convince himself that he was a lunatic, crazed and senseless. And as much as he hated that fact, it gave Remus a sick sort of hope that he might actually be able to prise something of the truth from Black.

“Easy one first – well, easier to explain. It was a bastard to find you. I didn’t think you’d have stuck around your old place, but I thought I might be able to find some people – well, werewolves, who knew you. I happened to find a rather talkative pack, scavenging, like me – practically wild, wasn’t even full moon – who were doing their best to keep out of the way of the ministry authorities. Took a risk, but… that’s nothing new. Thought they wouldn’t much care who I was if I could get them some food –”

“Get to the point,” Remus said shortly, cutting off Black’s breathless rambling. He watched his eyes struggle to focus anew on his face, as if he had forgotten to whom he was telling his story. Before he opened his mouth again he swallowed and licked his parched lips.

“I was lucky. They said a lot of you lived round here. Industrial area, no kids, plenty of wasteland, and there’s a sort of established community, black market, that stuff. Spent the last week or so sneaking up staircases. Thought if I checked every so often you might turn up in one. But as soon as I got near the back door of this place I could smell you – thought I was delusional but I was desperate enough to wait, just in case.”

“But you’re sitting in front of my door. You knew I was here – the ministry doesn’t know where I am and somehow _you_ can find me.”

“That’s why I could find you, Remus. I know how to think like someone trying to hide. I know how to ask the right questions, and being a fugitive endears you more to people in exile. It helps that people living on the outskirts probably haven’t seen me in the news. And if you weren’t hiding I’d never have got near you, they’d have swarmed all over you the minute I escaped, because you’re such an obvious target. My unfinished business – ha!”

He laughed for a few moments longer, but it was an awful sound like the crunching of stiff gears. Remus shuddered; he forced himself to remember to keep him talking, but not to listen too carefully. This spectacle was disturbing enough for him to wonder whether whatever was afflicting Black was contagious.

“How d’you know I’m not being watched? They might be behind any of these doors.”

Having mustered the remainder of his courage to say this with a straight face, Remus felt deeply satisfied when Black’s twisted, hysterical smile slipped away and was replaced by a strange, distant expression, practically vacant. It was like horror but significantly more profound, going deeper than the simple fear that he had walked into an obvious trap.

“I don’t expect to survive this – I never had a long term plan. That was never an option. I don’t really care whether you kill me now, or hand me over to the aurors who may or may not be hiding behind that door, or… whatever you want to do with me. I could have kept going by myself. I could have got up there and done it and died, and it would be over. A fitting end to a shit life. But then I thought about you – as far as I knew you were still alive, and just realising that, once I was free and finally had a clear head… I realised I owed you more. You – I’ve been in prison but I don’t think it’s anything, it’s easy being locked up, being free is, it’s so agonizing when you’re anything but –”

His speech seemed to break apart as Black momentarily lost his grasp on sense. With each gasping breath a few more tears poured from his shining eyes. For Remus, holding the wand steady was a chore now, but listening to this raving made him sick, and clinging to the certainty he had lived with for twelve years Remus held it up.

“Whatever you’re trying to say doesn’t matter. As far as I’m concerned you’re already dead. I’m not interested in torturing you by making you go on with this.”

“I’m sorry, Remus – there are no more ways left for me to torture myself for what I did – all I’m trying to tell you is, when I realised I was free – I was _free_ , physically at least – I thought I might as well make my inevitable capture and death worth something more than revenge. In there, I was so consumed by anger… outside there was finally a break in the fog. I haven’t forgotten you. I know how much I made you suffer – I wouldn’t help that by finding him and ripping out his throat, and very quickly getting myself killed.”

Remus was barely hearing him anymore, so astounded was he at Black’s nerve. Dimly, he wondered how he could possibly feel outraged, when he knew this man’s despicable character so well. But whatever his motive, the very fact of his words made Remus’ blood boil. He could not decide whether Black’s tears would be more hateful if they came out of genuine despair or were just for show. The fact that it was a convincing show upset him to the point that he could not contain his emotion, and it felt as if that same initial trauma had come back to him, undiluted after twelve years.

“You know, I believe you’re sane, Black. You did know and you still do know what you’re doing. But I don’t know anything else about you. I don’t know how deep your evil cunning goes, or your blind, narrow-minded, narcissistic slyness. So I’ll just say this: if you truly think you have the right to apologise to me, or to explain yourself, or – or actually tell me that you know how much you have made me suffer, and that you _want to make it up to me_ , you are the worst kind of fool. You owe me nothing because I wouldn’t take anything from you. You’re dead, you’re a closed book. I don’t want to think about you, or feel anything about you. You don’t have the right to ease any part of my suffering, and you certainly don’t have the right to ease your conscience, if it exists, by explaining yourself to me. You murdered that right sixteen times over.”

He was shaking; his mouth was horribly dry, his vision swayed and blurred. He was speaking at a great distance from himself, but when he found he was finished he managed to maintain something of the stoic composure he had clung to for so long. And as he looked at the gasping, shrunken man on the floor he felt peculiarly blank. Perhaps it was exhaustion, or adrenaline, but by now he didn’t really see him as a person. He was a relic from the past and he wasn’t going to stay for long.

“The only thing I want from you – I want to know why you escaped after so long. Honestly, I don’t care how you got out. But – Black – _look at me_ – why now?”

The other man had slid closer to the ground, his chin resting on his chest as if merely taking a moment to doze. But Remus could see his eyes through the filthy net of hair and they were open, fixed on his feet. He might have been thinking; he might have been unable to think. It was a slight shock then when he did speak in this midst of his stupor and his voice was nothing like the nasty growl Remus half-expected. It was simply the voice of a man for whom retaining his humanity was a long struggle.

“Why do you think I escaped?”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“I saw one paper –” he licked his lips pointlessly, “muggle, but even so – had my face on the front page.” Suddenly he closed his eyes and Remus tensed himself for a collapse, but Black kept himself up with one bony hand on the floor. The other, Remus noticed, crept over his viciously rumbling stomach. “Well, it caught my attention. Said I was probably armed. Something about gang associations. And the photograph caption said I was ‘remorseless’ after my arrest. So, obviously, I’d got out to kill someone else, according to anyone with sense. Why else would I bother? And – it, it scared me shitless – because that maniac wasn’t me, none of it was me, but – they were right. Why else _would_ I? I didn’t come all this way to starve to death, just for the sake of… pissing as a free man again." 

“You won’t get near him, Black. Never.” There was so much strength in Remus’ certainty that it shook in his voice, and as he spoke the last word his hand tightened around his wand. Black flinched as if he had seen the first twitch of an imminent attack, but when nothing came he let out a shuddering breath and pressed his fingers into his eyes.

“D’you mean my godson?”

“The son of the people you made sure were killed in their own house –” Remus cut himself off with a short breath. Inside he was slipping ever closer towards an uncontrolled rage, and he refused to allow Black that satisfaction. Any emotion was liable to be manipulated. Deliberately calm, he fixed his eyes on him anew. “I doubt there’s anyone safer than he is at the moment.”

“Yes, he’s very safe. Left to wander the streets in the dark until he’s practically run over. I only caught a glimpse –”

“What are you talking about?”

“He looks so much like his dad, I half expected him to recognise me.”

The hand holding the wand lunged for the cowering man’s face, and Remus barely found the self-restraint to stop it between his eyes. Without a conscious thought he had driven Black into the corner so quickly his skull had smacked the brick behind him, and when Black opened his eyes, by now stinging and red, they didn’t come up to meet Remus’, but circled his feet, the floor, the far end of the corridor. There was simply no question of a fight.

“I know you thrive amongst chaos, but there’s nothing to gain from this. I’m not giving you whatever it is you want.

“I saw him, Remus. A couple of weeks ago. I don’t know where he went. He didn’t seem too safe, or happy. But he’s alive. I just wanted to see he was all right.” 

“Why are you lying?”

“I swear – on my way north I found myself nearby – I remembered where they were taking him – I just thought, I dunno, I could see him, remind myself other people still existed. People I care about are still alive. That’s what I mean, why I came here – I hated myself for twelve years, so once I was out I realised I _hated_ the thought of destroying myself for that… worthless filth. Even if I die for it, I don’t want to die for nothing but hate. If I could talk to you again – at least that’s something. I don’t know if my life’s worth anything, but yours matters, and his matters.”

Black touched the ground with his fingers and pulled himself away from the wall with a shuddering effort. His breath came in a few short quavers as he twitched and fidgeted trying to sit on his bones, but some kind of pain seemed to shoot along his back whenever he was still. Finally he shook his head and licked his wet lips, that shudder still running through him.

“So when I get the bastard I can say something a bit more noble than, ‘you destroyed my life, so I’m going to disembowel you.’ He has to see everything he’s done - I want him to feel your pain, and Harry’s, as well as mine.”


	4. Chapter 4

Remus forced himself to take a moment to make sure he was in control of his anger before he spoke. In the meantime he shook his head, pressing the tip of his wand a fraction of an inch closer to Black’s clammy forehead.

“You are mad – whatever you’re on about, you’ve lost your mind. How could you possibly have seen him? And what, you’re trying to tell me you actually care about him, after you killed his parents?”

“I didn’t kill them!” Black shrieked, for the first time rearing up with the sort of strength only rage and grief could have given him. Remus stared down at him with stinging, disbelieving eyes. “Even you know I didn’t kill them – I’m sure it’s my fault they’re dead – but when I heard what had happened, oh… like I’d been impaled through the stomach. Then when I realised… after I knew Harry would be safe, I didn’t rest for a second until I’d hunted him down. At some point he must have known I was on his tail, and he led me into the middle of the street, people all around. I thought he was an idiot on top of an evil traitorous _worm_ – I thought, he’d never be able to get away from there, all those people. And I was prepared to change and rip his throat out right there if he even tried. I probably would have killed him, Remus. Maybe that’s why I went quietly, because even though I hadn’t, I knew I would have done if I’d got the chance.

“But – I knew he was a worthless coward but I never thought he’d gone that far over. Every one of those people – just dead, he slaughtered them because they were standing there. To be capable of that you either have to be insane or completely without conscience. That was why I was so shocked. I thought he might have some remorse that he _ratted_ , plead and say he had no choice. He _did_ say that – well, he whimpered it. And then he shouted that I’d killed them. I don’t know who was left alive to report what he said, but it was all in the papers, wasn’t it?”

“You’re – y-you’re talking about Peter. You’re telling me that _he –_ ”

“Yes, that snivelling excuse for a rat, who I thought was too scared or too useless to ever look suspicious. I thought I’d be more of a target, y’know, the obvious choice for keeping bloody secrets. But I didn’t realise – it was too late when I did – he was the fucking _rat_ , Remus, the rat! And I know where he is, and I’m going to eviscerate him.”

“No, just, stay there, don’t move.” Remus straightened his aching arm as Black actually made to push himself onto his feet, his eyes quite wild and blind except for whatever he was seeing in his head. Black barely heard him and continued his struggle with his weakened limbs, and although he lacked even the strength to force himself to stand, Remus realised his mind was blank and if it came to it he could not think of any way of overpowering the crazed and delirious man. But only a moment later the fit was over, and Black sagged to the floor, eyes streaming but focused once again 

“Why – what would I have to gain by lying? I know where he is, where he’s hiding. If he’s not there, they can take me away, kill me, let me kill myself. After twelve years, I couldn’t just escape on a whim with some ridiculous story on the smallest chance that I could somehow trick you into hiding me. What would be the point, what sort of life is that?”

“It’s better than prison, surely.”

“Not for long, though, not until you could prove I was mad or lying. How difficult could that be if I was?”

“Wherever you think he is, if he wasn’t there you’d just say he was somewhere else.”

Remus stood up as straight and tall as he could manage. He expected that Black would either falter and start to beg or grow enraged, indignant, possibly violent, now that there was nothing more he could add to his story. He thought it would be pointless to say outright that he didn’t believe Black’s tale, partly because it would be easier to keep him calm if he seemed to humour him, and because he thought it wouldn’t take long before Black started to contradict himself and prove that he was delusional – or lying. Remus had not even begun to puzzle over Black’s ridiculous claims because they were so patently false – they had to be – and because he knew what Black was and he could not be wrong. So that was another reason not to argue; he could not bear to pay mind to the story enough even to work out its inconsistencies.

He was taken aback however when he saw Black ponderously shaking his head, his expression almost serene. It was a look of certainty that turned Remus cold, suddenly forced to feel doubt over something he did not even comprehend.

“There was a photograph, in the paper, weeks ago.”

“I’m surprised you were interested enough in the events outside of your cell to read it.”

“Anything to vary the day. The man who gave it to me looked important, you never know when they might review your case.” He stretched the corners of his mouth into a tired smirk, the rest of his face humourless. “Well. I looked through it. In the middle… there was a picture of this family that had won some contest. They’d gone on holiday. I just glanced at it, and –” As he watched in dawning dread, Remus saw Black’s eyes cloud over, and he knew he was seeing it again – but seeing what? Black was lying, this was all his warped fiction. But as he opened his twitching mouth again his eyes were burning, and he was visibly sweating even as he shivered.

“He was there. Rat. Sitting on one lad’s shoulder – a boy about to go back to school, Remus. It said next to the picture.” His eyes fluttered and he was reading it, and he ground his teeth. “He’s some kid’s pet and I doubt he’d miss the chance to tag along.”

Remus wondered when he had ever been so lost. At the word ‘school’ he had stiffened, because there was no need to ask which school Black had meant. But there were so many reasons to doubt him still that he had no choice but to cling to any thread of hope he could find.

“A boy – a muggle?”

“No.” Black spoke the single syllable as if it were a death knell. “The kid of someone who works at the ministry. He looked about the same age as Harry. For all I know they’re friends – for all I know that rat is sleeping in the bed next to his.”

“The rat…” Suddenly it struck Remus exactly what Black was saying, and his own certainty returned like a second spine. “You saw a picture of a boy’s pet rat – and for that, you broke out of Azkaban?” For a moment Remus was so incredulous that he forgot his rage, his disgust, and his terror. He actually laughed, light-headed and exhausted. “Y’know, I hope you’re lying, because if you believe your own story you’re beyond delusional.”

“D’you think I wouldn’t recognise him when he’s been like an infestation in my head for twelve years?”

“I think if you were that obsessed, you’d see him anywhere you wanted to! How could you possibly recognise a picture of a rat that – even if he _wasn’t_ dead, even if you _hadn’t_ killed him yourself – you haven’t seen in over a decade?”

“Well. When he left me standing in the middle of that street, I was in shock, and god knows how long I was there – but the whole time, I was staring at that little hole he ran through. And there was something next to it that I didn’t really see until people started screaming and I remembered what the hell was going on. A finger – everyone that he killed around me died without a scratch, y’know, but there was this bloody finger right in front of me that I just couldn’t think why it was there. I think even you know about that. It was a headline for a while. And that rat – I knew it was him straight away, I know his eyes and the ears and everything too well – but apart from that, it had one toe missing. I looked at it long enough to know.”

It was a piece of evidence that Remus couldn’t think how to deny, and although he refused to believe it even now he realised that he had become invested in this story. But it was only evidence if he could see it in front of him, and as it was he had no way of knowing the photograph even existed.

“Until you can show me this picture, Black, I have no reason to listen to you.”

“Well, I couldn’t very easily hang onto it – did you happen to get the newspaper at all in July? I forget which date it was exactly –”

“I’d hardly be keeping a low profile if I got owls delivering it daily, would I? I only found out – I saw you on the muggle news. But they said you were last seen in the south.”

“Really? Well, they might have been guessing. I never showed my face until now. Or… not when anyone was around.”

“It doesn’t matter, because you’ve given yourself up. Your story is insane, and you have no proof – in fact it’s obvious what you’re doing. This alleged rat is going to Hogwarts, and, oh yes, isn’t that a coincidence? Who else is going there but your beloved godson?”

“If I wanted to kill Harry, I could have done it weeks ago. I know exactly where he lives. I stood outside his house, and I saw him on the pavement ten feet in front of me. And I certainly wouldn’t have waited twelve years to break out and do it. Didn’t you say yourself you didn’t think I was mad? Why would I, a sane man, stand around in the street after I’d killed fourteen people, and wait to be taken off to prison, if I wanted him dead so badly?”

“I – I wasn’t there, Sirius, how can I know what happened? For all I know you were knocked unconscious, or Peter hexed you before you killed him –”

“Remus – it sounds insane because it’s true, and it is insane. I’m not clever enough to make up something like this.”

He was visibly losing strength, and as he weakened he resorted to pleading. Remus wondered if he himself was almost as tired and weak as Black looked then, for he felt quite hollow, almost faint from standing there so stiffly. But for as long as Black lasted, he would not give in. He would not let the dam between his reason and his emotion crack.

“How many times d’you think you’ll have to tell me it’s true before I believe it?” He said at last, not entirely succeeding in keeping his fatigue out of his voice. Black opened his mouth, but whatever he needed to say to pierce deeper through Remus’ armour he couldn’t find. For a while only shallow, rasping breaths came out.

“Just… please… imagine it _is_ true,” Sirius gasped; he was too weak to hold up his head, yet somehow his eyes found Remus. “Think it through. And tell me what’s more plausible – Peter being alive, or me betraying James. And you.”


	5. Chapter 5

Unable to resist against the pitiful whine of the dying dog, Remus was forced to realise that Black, starved and sprawled in the corner, his eyes leaking and indiscernible from those he still recognised as his old friend’s, did not look like a killer, or a monster. But before he could even consider Black’s request, before he was remotely tempted by it, Remus shook his head in defiance.

“I’m not doing anything you ask until you offer me proof. We won’t play it your way, because I think you are clever enough to think up all this. You’ve certainly had long enough to do it.”

“Long enough – in Azkaban? You’ve never been there, have you?” Though Remus didn’t know how good an actor he was, he thought when he met Black’s eyes then that it was not possible to feign fear like that. Perhaps dread was a better word; it filled his eyes and drew his mouth tight in such a way that Remus imagined the horror growing inside Black, taking root over twelve years and withering everything light, and hopeful, and young. Disturbed at the thought of Black’s rotten insides, he shook his head again.

“No, course you haven’t. But you know about – the things – the guards… it’s not a place where you can think freely. You don’t get a chance to think things through and sort your head out. Gods, if only. I think if you live long enough in there, you have to go mad. I had a defence, I could transform and I didn’t have to think so much. But you don’t get to plan; if you’re human enough to think you’re forced to drown. You dwell on misery and guilt and every evil thing you’ve seen or done – you can’t pull your head free, I promise you.

“And it doesn’t help at all that you know you’re innocent, because they make you realise you’re _not_ , you have so many other things to regret and hate yourself for. I never forgot the truth, but so many times, I was so close to going under… just giving up, wallowing in everything I’d ever done that had hurt someone. The dog was a great relief… but if I didn’t have that knowledge to cling onto, that I wasn’t a traitor or a killer, I wouldn’t have lasted two years, let alone twelve.”

Suddenly, and with a leaden weight in his stomach, Remus realised the effort he was making to disbelieve Black. His stubborn conviction wasn’t enough; with every pitiful protestation Black made he had to find some new way of maintaining the belief that he was lying. Because in truth he was aching with love and grief for his friend for whom he had long mourned, and whom he desperately needed to return as he was – before he had ever suspected him of being in league with the dark side.

No, he had never suspected it, not for a single minute up until the overwhelming evidence was presented to him in newspaper headlines. And he remembered the awful guilt he had felt for a long time, knowing that he was grieving for Sirius perhaps even more than the friends who had died. They died horribly but nobly, their spirits intact; Sirius had been ruined, and what should have been Remus’ closest remaining friend was gone forever. And now he feared to speak lest his despair burst out before he could check it.

But after a long, silent struggle with himself, Remus did allow one weakness. He could not let himself believe what he had heard, but he couldn’t deny the proof his eyes were giving him any longer; Black was exhausted, weak and ill, and he was dying of hunger and god knows what else as he watched. At last, with a shudder that threatened to bring him to the floor beside Black, he let his right hand drop – at first only an inch, but once he had given in that much it wasn’t long before it had fallen to his side. After that he could only stand there shivering, and he wondered if the damp on his face was sweat.

Sirius was looking upwards, apparently amazed, but hardly daring to hope too much. Remus’ face remained hard, and he still did not say anything although his mind was working feverishly. He had never had so little time to think about something so massive.

“Remus…” Black began softly, perhaps afraid that a single sound would bring Remus back to his senses. Yet it had little effect, except perhaps that Remus closed his eyes very briefly, and so quite quickly he went on. “I’m sure you managed to convince yourself you never knew me – that I was acting the whole time I was your friend. And I don’t blame you. What choice did you have? If it helped you cope, or get on with your life, then, good. If you did get on with your life – I’m glad for you, I know it can’t have been easy. But I swear you did know me. You knew me when I was a kid, for god’s sake, you were the first friends I ever had. Y-you and… you were closer to me than anyone.”

“Why can’t you say their names?” Somehow, although he had lowered his wand, Remus knew he still held power over Black, and knowing that, he wanted to give Black no choice but to be entirely vulnerable. The severity of this question had its effect, and Black started slightly, the fear growing again in his eyes.

“I can, Remus… but the guilt and the shame I feel, it’s almost unbearable.”

“So tell me what you did, and why you feel so guilty.”

Black flinched again at this attack, and Remus could see with some satisfaction that this approach was far more frightening to him than an outstretched wand.

“I told you –”

“You haven’t told me enough. You said Peter did everything, and left you to take the blame. But how was that possible when _you_ were the one they trusted as their Secret Keeper?”

“I – I was the obvious choice, wasn’t I? James’ best friend, godfather to his bloody son! I thought they’d come for me first to find them, and… I didn’t want to risk betraying them under torture. It’s easy to say you won’t, but… gods, it takes a strong person to resist. So I thought they’d be safer with someone less conspicuous, and… I suggested an exchange.”

Remus didn’t have to think too hard to guess why Black’s face turned so dark then. Somehow, he couldn’t resist antagonising him even further, if only so he could see how deep the guilty nerve went.

“Very selfless, wasn’t it? Let someone else take that burden for you.”

“For god’s sake, I was near certain I’d be killed for that information! I wasn’t trying to protect myself, I wanted to make sure that when they did come for me, I couldn’t give them what they wanted. I was glad to be the decoy… But it was stupid of me. I was so short-sighted… I’d lost faith in good people because I thought they would never have the same power as evil people have to corrupt, and dishearten and sow suspicion. I thought we’d have to play it like they did, underhand and in the dark, rather than just putting our trust in brave people, good magic. To me, the r… _Peter_ seemed like the sort of person who’d be all too happy to keep his head down and hide. No fits of gallantry, no risking his neck. Not the sort of person anyone would suspect to be trusted with vital information. War made me very cynical. I mistook that for wisdom, and I trusted weakness over a good heart.

“And I’ll be honest – I’m sorry, Remus, but I thought you might be the one leaking information. Only because… well, the so-called good guys have never been kind to werewolves, have they? I thought… maybe you’d had a better offer. And I only thought that because I thought it would take guts to be a spy for your friends, and I knew you had guts. I found out it took the opposite. A cowardly _worm_ of a spine. But that’s why I underestimated his cunning. I thought he’d done it under duress, and maybe he had, but when I confronted him – I suppose he knew I was going to kill him, and he threw out what was left of his conscience so he could live in the sewers. That’s true cowardice – it would have been far braver to leave those people alive. And all of it was my doing, because I trusted his cowardice over your loyalty and my own. I don’t have any way to make up for that – except by giving him the justice he deserves.”

His tone was so frank and his words so bitter, so unappetising, that Remus found himself unable to see the lie. When Black had confessed mistrusting _him_ , he had bristled with hurt because it struck such a sensitive nerve – but it was so sensitive partly because his long-held resentment for the ‘good guys’ had, he remembered, sometimes put him at odds with his duty to his friends, just as Black had suggested.

He had never been tempted by the darkness, of course. He hated them if for no other reason than the fact that they were responsible for inflicting him with his curse of an illness. But as a young man he had hated the wizarding government almost as much as the Dark Lord and his forces, and he still remembered with a pit in his stomach the times when this had brought him into conflict with his friends, when they ought to have been united against the darkness. He’d held such a grudge against the ministry that he had always advised against trusting their methods of protection, preferring to act alone and, as he saw it, uncompromised by official restraints. His ‘advice’ had alienated a few potential allies, and he believed it had further influenced his closest friends’ fervent desire to take warfare and resistance into their own hands. At the time it had seemed necessary; in the many years since, he had realised the true cost of his pride and his zeal.

He held little love for the authorities even now – after all, wasn’t he evading them and their registers even as he stood there? – but his anger had cooled with premature age and experience, after grief had bound him too closely to the memory of his friends to sour it with bitterness towards the regime which had failed him. After all, he had failed them as well, in far more damaging ways.

It was that same undignified guilt which he recognised in Sirius as he spoke. Remus knew it might be nothing more than manipulation, but to him it did not seem likely that a desperate escaped murderer would spin such a damning, guilt-ridden tale. He didn’t know if an evil man would think to churn those emotional depths. If this was an act, and Black didn’t truly believe what he was saying, it was the most subtle and intricate any dying man had ever dreamed up. If it was the truth – no, he couldn’t consider that yet. It was too great a thing to think that he had hated the wrong man for twelve years.

“You said that I knew you at school,” Remus said after a heavy pause, surprised to find his voice steady. Somehow he sensed that things were coming to a climax. “But I knew Peter as well, didn’t I? We all did, and he wasn’t a murderer.”

“Of course he wasn’t _then_. He was our friend for a while. But that meant something else to him than to us. It meant protection, inflating his ego. It’s not so easy to stay on the side of good when your friends are disappearing and dying all around you if you’re not as strong or brave or clever as every one of them.”

“You almost sound like you sympathise with him.”

“I would have done, if he’d come and told us how he felt, how scared he was. We’d have protected him the same as them. If he’d _told_ us he couldn’t die for us… well, I can only think things would have been different. But when he made the choice to turn on us, he made the choice to stop being the person we knew. I don’t think he was always acting; we all had doubts, but most of us didn’t act on them. Or not like he did. I think he decided who he wanted to be when he chose his life over his loyalty to us, and then when there was no going back, there was no point holding on to ideals. He was weak, and I suppose somehow he convinced himself that _we_ were the enemy – maybe ‘cause he’d always felt the odd one out. But whatever it was, what he did put him beyond reach. Those thirteen others… I don’t know why they had to die. That’s one thing I’ll have to ask him before I kill him.”


	6. Chapter 6

For a second, the bald aggression in Black’s voice stunned Remus. He had spoken so calmly, so sagely about Peter, as if he understood every thought which had led to his alleged betrayal. But somehow Remus had mistaken this detached understanding for forgiveness, and he had forgotten the near madness he had seen before in Black’s eyes, in his whole body, when he talked about hunting down the man who had reduced him to this state.

“Why – how can you say you’re going to kill him? Doesn’t that make you the same as him?”

“Are you telling me you wouldn’t want him dead? Doesn’t it make you sick that he’s alive, completely free, and if he felt like it he could sneak into my godson’s bed and snap his neck?”

“Even if it were true – to say you’re going to kill him yourself is very different from bringing him to justice.”

“It is justice, Remus, and it’s only one fifteenth of what he deserves. I wouldn’t be betraying a friend by killing him. I’d be avenging two – two dead friends, and thirteen others. And let’s say I found him… if I bumped into him in the street, and he had nowhere to run, he wouldn’t think twice before he killed me this time. Or you. What difference does one or two more old friends make to him now? If it was all true – and it is, for all the good it does to say it – how can you say he doesn’t deserve it? I’m not exactly an impartial party in this, but I’m not just doing it for my sake, Remus. He can’t get away with it and let us rot for what he’s done. He needs retribution, the people he’s killed need it! He took the parents away from my godson, and probably the children of half a dozen others in that street.

“And of course I have a selfish motive. He put me in prison so he wouldn’t have to go, and I think he owes me his life for that. Even if it’s more my own fault than his that I was arrested. I didn’t have to go after him. I suppose I was intending to end up getting arrested that day anyway. If I’d been thinking straight I would have stayed away so I could try and help the people who still mattered. Harry, for one. If I ever meet him I won’t be able to look him in the eye, I’ve let him down so badly.

“But part of me just wants his skin for myself – the rat’s, I mean, not Harry’s. Before this – I don’t know what I had, but I was alive and I wanted to keep being alive. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care if I live but it does sting more than I can describe that he helped put an end to my life, and I never had the chance to even speak in my own defence. That’s what drove me to break out of Azkaban when I saw his picture. But when I was out I managed to clear my head a bit, and I realised I wasn’t the only one that mattered in this. And that’s why I came to you. If I die now, before I get anywhere near him, I won’t leave a world where someone doesn’t know the truth. More importantly – I wouldn’t die with nothing but hate inside me. I’d rather regret not killing him than regret losing all of my humanity… or not explaining myself to you.”

Black’s voice had worn down to a hoarse growl since the first time he had spoken, and when he finally allowed himself to stop for breath he started to cough in violent gasps. There was more sweat on his face but his skin had, if possible, lost colour, as if he had brought his death that much closer merely by referring to it. Seeing this, and struggling as he was to process Black’s fraught and twisting logic, Remus was helpless to respond. For a while he listened to the echo of those last few words: _explaining myself… explaining myself to you… nothing but hate inside me… the truth…_ what was he supposed to make of that? He’d said something like it earlier but he hadn’t listened. Did it mean Black would rather die for him than the traitorous Wormtail he despised? But what did it matter now? After so long, when Sirius Black was a stain in Remus’ memory, why was it so important that he make his peace?

“You… risked your life to come here,” Remus started uncertainly, blinking as if he were coming out of a short sleep. Looking anew on the shrunken body below him, and meeting Black’s wet and yearning eyes, gave him back his urgency. “You must have thought someone would be watching. Or that I’d kill you, or turn you in.”

“Won’t you?” Sirius croaked, his expression unreadable. Remus swallowed and did not answer the question.

“But you say – Peter, this boy’s rat, is everything to you. If you’re right, and by some miracle you survived long enough to find him, wouldn’t that mean you could prove your innocence? Why would you have to end up dead for this?”

“Remus, the moment I show my face I’ll be killed before I can open my mouth. And even if I could just very quickly tell them I’m innocent, I’m just here to steal this boy’s rat ‘cause he’s the one who really did it, they’d be more certain than ever that I’m insane. And then they’d kill me. If I get to Peter at all I don’t want to waste my time trying to bring him in, I’m going to do anything in my power to get him out of the way. And if someone caught me in the act, they’d hardly stop to identify the man I’m trying to murder just to check it’s the same man who faked his death twelve years ago. If I want his head I’ll have to get it. They can kill me and figure it all out afterwards, but at least I’d die knowing I’d had my justice.”

“So why come here at all? Why risk it, if you’re so ready to die to kill him?”

“Didn’t I say it clearly enough?” The question could have been acid with the right tone, but Black’s voice was soft, sounding to Remus’ ears as if he were deeply concerned. “You mean so much more to me than that scum. I’d gladly rip his throat out, but… I’m still human. I won’t turn into what he’s tried to make me before I try, at least, to make something better of myself… well, something better of the carnage I left here. I’m not a bloody dog. I’m not a… something rotting on the street. I shouldn’t have been, I never, never wanted this… for me, for anyone…”

He was crying weakly. Remus was lost for a reply, stone-faced and staring. In that stark moment he saw the scene from the other side: Sirius had come to him in desperation because he was his last living friend – he had always been so fiercely, recklessly loyal – because he had clung to the things he loved throughout the worst time of his life, those the people he had hurt the most with his arrest, and he had never forgotten the debt he owed. He hadn’t grieved for Remus, hated him, and learned not to think of him or what he used to be, as Remus had for Sirius. Remus’ old friend had been dead to him for a long time, but he had never ceased to be a guilty ache in Black’s mind. And here he was, professing with laboured breaths that this was his last wish, to see him and explain.

“You’re here to… ask forgiveness?” With one dirty, shaking hand over his eyes, Black shook his head. “Did you want to apologise?” No. “Confess? Tell me why you did it?” An adamant no. “You – you just wanted to tell me you were innocent? Even though I have no reason to believe you?”

“I am not a monster! I will not live up to my name now, I will not be the remorseless, soulless, evil thing everybody thinks I am, even when I have nothing else to lose! You know me, Remus – I could get away with murder because that’s what everyone expects. They know there’s no other reason I’d get out, but _I_ know, _I_ know myself and even if I am worth less than shit, I’m not going to prove you right about what you think of me. Imagine it – if you loved someone like a brother, and you helped give them so much grief, but you couldn’t tell them you didn’t mean it… it’d eat at you, wouldn’t it? It does, it’s eating me, Remus! It’s eating me, I can feel myself being bitten…”

He was scratching his neck compulsively, jerking his head like a flea-bitten dog and seeming to growl under his breath even as he spoke. Remus was watching him wordlessly, following the sweat which dripped down his forehead and the twitching of his eyes as they watched something invisible run between his feet. Then he heard him start to mutter as he scratched, and out of the low, rough stream he heard one word quite distinctly, one which Black kept repeating: rat.

In that moment he still couldn’t see the truth of it all, and he had no way of knowing it, no way of separating lies from fact from madness. He didn’t know who he was watching, mumbling and sweating and scratching, at his feet; he certainly couldn’t just decide to trust him, not even if he had the picture of the rat in front of him. But he glanced behind him at the dingy reach of the landing, at the flat and faceless doors (behind which to his knowledge there was no one, certainly no aurors), at the brown bag he had dropped days or years ago, and he made up one quiet, tired part of his mind.

“Can you stand up?”


	7. Chapter 7

There was no doubt that Sirius heard him; Remus saw his head jerk, for one second rising from his chest to look at him. But maybe that was all his strength allowed, or else he heard the sound of Remus’ voice but couldn’t make out the words – for he made no other motion in reply. It might have been anything that brought such sick anguish to his face, Remus couldn’t say, but it was possible that he was, in that instant, afraid of what would happen to him at Remus’ hands.

“Black – can you stand up?”

No answer – but then a sudden movement which caught Remus by surprise, as Black put all ten of his overlong fingernails into the wall in order to push himself up and leap into a run. That must have been his intention, anyway, but before Remus could even react (except to step backwards in shock) he had fallen headlong, panting and scrabbling at the floor. Through some great and painful effort he did manage to pull himself to his feet, but after one stride he collapsed to his knees, his left leg given out. Black howled; Remus moved towards him, and there was no attempt at a struggle as he took him under the arms and heaved.

Lifting Sirius Black was like pulling rotten grass out of the ground. His thin and brittle mass came up so easily that Remus almost lost his balance, having expected the weight of a normal man. And he forgot the stink as well, which he tasted and felt in the stinging wetness of his eyes, and if he hadn’t before tasted and smelt the dying intestines of wild animals on his hands and in his hair, he might have gagged. With his arms around Black’s wheezing chest, he could feel the extent of his malnourishment and neglect – the muscle had withered in his arms and back, and with it every trace of flesh. He could have carried him without difficulty, but there was no need; with one of Black’s arms around his shoulders, he led him quietly to the threshold of his door. Black’s feet might have dragged more than they really walked, but he made no sound all the same. Remus didn’t dare look at his face as he opened the door with a quick tap of his wand.

They got inside quickly, and before he had shut the door Remus let go of Black’s hollow chest, not dropping him but letting him balance for a moment on his own feet. It was a wonder he stayed up once he had taken his arms away, but as if in defiance to his captor Black did not fall again now that he was standing – in fact he made no movement at all, swaying slightly but otherwise quite stiff and motionless in the centre of Remus’ dark, bare room. Somehow Remus knew he would stay there of his own accord for the time being.

Very softly, but hurrying in his steps, Remus went to the top of the stairs where he had dropped his shopping. He was not hungry when he bought the food, and nor was he hungry now; he felt so far from thinking about food that he couldn’t imagine ever wanting to eat. But for one thing, it would seem strange, even to the few indifferent junkies and criminals who squatted in the building, that someone had left a bag of food on the landing – and for another, Black would probably be ready to kill for food very shortly, and at any cost Remus wanted to keep him calm. Not to mention alive.

In seconds (stopping only to hurriedly mend the paper bag) he was back inside the splintering room which had passed for a home over the last few days, and once the door was closed and locked he made to tap Black, standing just as he was before, on the shoulder. But his hand was stopped by the sudden rasp of his voice, pitch faltering with the unmistakable quiver of desperate tears.

“Don’t drag this out any more if you’re going to kill me – please, Remus. Do it before I have to look at you again.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” Remus said flatly. It was the slimmest of mercies, if it was a mercy, but at once Black’s shoulders began to shake with such an awful despair that Remus was forced to swallow, his throat burning. “That’s all I’ll say. Unlike you I’m not so quick to murder old friends.”

“Remus – twelve years, it’s – h-hardly quick-k.”

“You went to look for him, though, you found him days later because you wanted to kill him.”

“I – yes – not, never was a paragon of virtue, was I? You had more c-conscience and morals than the rest of us put together – hardly worth adding the rat to that, though. And… I s’pose I could’ve just done it there. But I wanted to hear him say why he did it, there was no point killing him without that.”

“And now?” Remus didn’t really expect an answer, half-imagining that as he spoke to Black he was talking to his picture, not the man himself. Black had not yet turned around, and realising that the last time they had spoken face to face, or looked at one another on the same level, was over a decade ago, Remus began to hope he wouldn’t; he would just stand there until he dissolved into dust. The wait went on and there was no reply, and he didn’t turn around, and for now Remus could keep down his wriggling fear. But that wouldn’t last long.

“Why wouldn’t you let me get away?”

“What? Why… how could I have done?”

“Why do you need me here? I was ready to run – I’d never have to see you again.”

“You’d have died within two days – or you’d survive long enough to commit another murder –”

“But why do you care – what good am I here if you’re not going to turn me in? Or… do you believe me, Remus?”

It felt very strange not to look at Black’s face as he spoke, but Remus was glad in that instant that Black could not see his uncertainty, his weakness in the face of temptation. Wouldn’t it be so easy not to think, to take him at his word – but that wouldn’t be so easy when he came to wonder how he had mistaken his closest friends’ characters so catastrophically. After a moment he put his head in his hands; gods, he was exhausted.

“Look – I don’t have a plan. For now, let’s say I’m just… keeping you under guard. If the whole ministry comes and breaks down the door, I’m not going to risk my life for yours – but – I’ll try, I’ll do what I can to make them listen to you. Even if you’re guilty, you deserve a fair trial.”

Black made no sound, but as Remus watched him warily he thought he might have nodded. In truth, Remus felt it was far more than he deserved if he _was_ guilty of everything, but at this point in his life he thought it was about time he tried living up to those morals Black seemed to think he possessed. That was justice, wasn’t it? Maybe it was far too late, and maybe since the only people whose esteem mattered to him were dead it could never have helped at all, but for so long he’d done nothing to honour or avenge his friends. Suddenly he wondered if he was being just as selfish as always, looking for some way to make himself feel better, just as much of a coward by letting Black in. It all made him so tired, so sick of himself and everything.

“For now – I don’t know, you’ll have to stay inside. I’ve got some food –”

Remus started as with a vicious snarl Black turned to face him, and perhaps because he was so thin and wild he struck an intimidating figure, even as his face was wet with tears.

“Please,” he said with a harsh cough. Remus was stunned for a second by the horrible black glare of his pleading eyes; then without a word he dropped the bag at Black’s feet, and the man, with watery, wordless thanks, collapsed to his knees. He shook his head slightly – then in the space of a blink the man was gone and Remus watched a huge, filthy, bony dog rip through the paper with its teeth. Instinctively he stepped backwards, hand moving towards his wand, but the dog wasn’t interested in anything except whatever it could swallow – Remus watched it chew up half a loaf of bread, tomatoes, raw fish in a frenzy, probably ten times quicker than a man could have eaten.

Something inside him seemed to sink as he watched the ravenous animal – how much of it was human after all? Did Sirius Black die whenever the dog took over, or was each mind contained within the other? Remus didn’t know how a man could survive such a transformation, even taken willingly; all he knew was the pain, the trauma of having a new body rip through his own, and feeling his mind disintegrate into savagery. He knew it wasn’t the same kind of magic, but he had to wonder how much of the animal might bleed into the man – his three friends had certainly been wild, and wouldn’t it be fitting that Black would be the one to turn bloodthirsty? But then, he thought, far from easily; if that were possible, couldn’t the same be true for a man who lived inside the head of a rat?

“When you’ve finished – well – there’s more stuff in…” Remus could sense the dog was not listening to him, perhaps unable to properly understand him in this state of slavering hunger. As it growled at the empty bag and licked crumbs off the floor, Remus found himself floating towards the chair under the flat’s only window, drawn somehow by the damp, deep blue of the sky. He was distantly aware that he was slipping towards unconsciousness even on his feet, and sitting down with a desperate groan, he made one effort to keep his eyes on the dog which was mauling the last of the bread, wondering about restraining it somehow… him…


	8. Chapter 8

It was later when Remus woke – he knew even before he was awake, once the sound of rain broke through the deadweight of sleep – but it was such a drowsy hour he woke up to that he felt it could have been any time, any time or no time. He still wanted to sleep. But there was less than a moment in which he was still drifting in that timeless place before his senses came to him, muttered something, half drowned out by the rain but still enough for him to hear. He thought he should open his eyes, just in case – his eyes opened and everything was back, he was in his body once more and he could feel just how much it hurt. He was stiff from sitting and aching from having nothing to do but move the two days prior. But as much as he hurt now, it was still the lesser strain not to move at all than it was to rouse himself just to lie down a few yards to his right.

If his body was willing, his mind did not follow in sinking back into lifelessness now that his eyes had reminded him of the world. They didn’t quite see – they looked through an exhausted blur at a few silver outlines – but it was enough. Now he was thinking, as his mind had trained itself to do at the first moment of consciousness, to check for familiar surroundings, for any pain, for the smell of blood. But the instant of anxiety passed once Remus realised that the moon he dreaded would not come for another week, and by that time –

His heart caught fire in its haste to start him up as he jolted in his seat, at once tasting panic more profound than what came even in the first shock of his transformation. The room was dark but that presented no problem, as he only had to raise his – shit, where was it, both hands were empty, where was – he felt the wood under his heel, and as he bent quietly to pick up the wand he fixed himself in a wary crouch, quite ready to move in case the dog was poised to tear his face off with its stinking teeth. But in the glow of the light he cast he saw no dog at all – and no man.

For one moment he uncoiled, rushed by the relief that the dog had left – but he shook off the fatigue that brought that notion of relief, remembering the importance of keeping him, to what end he had no idea but at the very least to prolong the status quo. If he had gone, he’d have no hope of finding him – but then, he knew where he was going – gods, he would have no choice – the ministry, the school, he’d have to tell them. He couldn’t hunt him, no matter his resistance to outside interference in this duel of theirs. He shut up the groaning and screaming adolescent within him, the boy that shouted, ‘fuck those bastards, they’d come for you after that.’ He would eat his pride for once if the alternative was ever again allowing anyone to die for the sake of it.

But no small part of him hoped with the smallest, bitterest of hopes that there would be no chase – that if he had gone, he would die very soon with three hundred miles between him and his prey. And if he hadn’t left – examining his pitiful creaking nest of a room, Remus wondered whether there wasn’t some corner of it where Black might have gone to curl up in his filthy dog hair coat, simply too weak to refuse sleep somewhere he could get it away from the bursting sky. The sweat of the hunt was not on him and Remus wouldn’t rush out of his crawl after the weak black ghost of a dog haunting a man – not now, twelve years too late, in this body of a tired old coward. For the moment he made the compromise to stand, casting out with his wand, and to find the hole in which Black had found fit to bury his head.

Light skittered over the bed and Remus remembered leaving it – only the second night he’d slept there and that awful dream had pulled him out of it, a few hours after midnight, and he was forced to leave it in that state because of the noise outside – the long day became impossible to hold together. But somehow he knew how the bed had looked when he had shoved himself out of it, just as sunken and damp and strewn about with old sheets – he would have wept to crawl into it now. He didn’t; Black was neither in it nor on top nor pressed into the gap on either side. The man, perhaps even the dog, might have been wasted enough to drag himself on his stomach under the wooden frame, but Remus was certain that the mattress hung low enough that no creature (cockroaches excepted) could find space to sleep beneath it. To be entirely sure Remus ducked his head into the cobweb shroud that clung there. Nothing, a dim and grimy abundance of it.

Suddenly, water sounded – no, not rain, it was glancing off the window in beads – but the sound of a falling stream, or a wave pawing at the bank. And Remus turned his head in some confusion, thinking about pipes, but in turning his eye caught a light he hadn’t noticed, spilling just a needle’s width out from the bottom of the door behind the low rotted chair. Remus hadn’t thought of the bathroom. He’d barely used it since he’d found the place; he’d barely spent more than five hours awake in the rooms altogether, and he hadn’t given much thought to their contents but for the bed or the chair. But as he stood up, glowing wand aloft, he heard the same faint splash of gentle waves come through the wall and there was no doubt in his mind. Yet even though the man was completely closed in behind the door, Remus shifted himself towards it with apprehension. There was no increase in noise, no other sound at all. The light never flickered black under the door. This made him uneasy just the same, mistrustful through experience of quiet things, of appearances of calm and of friendly, hungry animals.

He gave no thought to stealth once he gained the threshold and opened the door – nor did he consider the possibility that the door might be locked, though even had it been he possessed an instrument quite capable of unlocking it – but as there was no resistance from the door he had no hesitation in shoving through it. He had to admit he wasn’t sure what he’d expected to see, but of all the possible scenarios, the one he entered was probably the least surprising, and as such Remus had not even entertained the notion – that Black (the man) might be sitting in a bath filled with water almost the black colour of his hair.

Yet there he was, naked and dripping grime, but from the look of it asleep – and once Remus realised he was unconscious, head against the wall and wet hair splayed out on it, he found himself staring in grim and startled fascination at the corpse, the body that was breathing but thin, empty, stuck about with bones like pottery fragments. His knees came up like jagged humps of a mountain out of lake water. And his skin wasn’t thin and grey all over but quite strikingly red, scaly with sores and scabs and the scarring of constant cold that dries it out and makes it rough and itches endlessly.

Remus felt for the door behind him, stepping backwards, anxious to be away from that sight, that somehow perverse intrusion onto something so pitiably ugly. Was pity the word? If he deserved it – but Remus couldn’t look at him any longer, loathe to choke with unhappiness if the man was not Black the heartless killer but Sirius – the friend, the tortured, starved, dying animal. Remus put the door between him and that, quietly as he could. He didn’t feel quiet, nor rested, nor fully safe. Nevertheless, it seemed that sleep wouldn’t wait.

The watch in his pocket told him he’d been passed out in the chair for no more than three hours, and he’d slept in such a hard position that he felt he ached more, or in some different place, than he had sloping back home early that evening. He would have gladly slept until morning, until afternoon, until the week had gone and the moon was waning, but though he laid down and buried his head there was no stopping it; the trickle of an inkling of a thought, crawling on his neck and through his hair. And the thought took him north.


	9. Chapter 9

No matter where Remus had been hiding over the past months, one person had always seemed able track him down – well, only one until now – but that one person was a man he trusted unconditionally, someone who would never betray his whereabouts if he wanted them secret, and someone to whom he felt he owed a large part of his life. And after years of silence, he had recently offered him something more. That offer had seemed impossible at first, ludicrous, and he had quickly turned it down without much thought. But that other man had thought enough to outwit a hundred of Remus, and of course he had returned, the offer still the same, but with one detail underlined: it wasn’t a favour to Remus that he offered, but one for himself that he asked. And suddenly it had seemed impossible, ludicrous, to refuse.

In fact, he had been on the point of accepting it at last when he had had to move again, to scramble for a bed in some place out of the way, far off the magical radar, and for less than fifty pounds a week (he had been so long abandoned by the wizarding world that he could not hope to earn anything but muggle currency, and that by only the least reputable means – he counted it as a victory that he had not yet lost himself enough to resort to magical forgery or prostitution). And for a night he was homeless once more, though not so miserable as it sounded with Remus being accustomed to living at night. But almost the instant he had first closed the door behind him in this room (almost, for his first action was to dry up some of the damp with his wand), he had found himself watching a speck which became an owl approaching the window.

For the third time he was given an ultimatum. That was three nights ago – his reply, in which he would finally agree, was inevitable, but he still had not accepted it as a reality. It was simultaneously certain and a fantasy in his mind, so much that it was driven from his consciousness the moment he last pulled himself from bed, and throughout the long course of that night, and the following days, whose grey unpleasantness had culminated in the reunion he had honestly never expected either of them to live to see – the matter, already resolved and dealt with and put away, had not resurfaced in his mind even with the mention of the place he was bound for. But once the horror and the shock of the black dog’s appearance had sunk away somewhat, once he had slept and allowed the concentrated adrenaline of almost two days’ urgency to leave his blood, he could bring himself back to the world that went on before and after those urgent moments. Now there was another dimension to the impossible problem of Sirius Black, and (strangling the sound of water in his ears with his pillow) he could not see a way to continue.

The bird which carried the message had flown off the second he had detached the note. It bore only a few words:

_Mr R. L.,_

_If you will accept this placement, expect my gratitude. I will place you in a world which will not discriminate. You will be of great help and use and there is no reason for you to waste yourself in hiding. A bird will come in exactly one week._

_A_

_P.S. A wise individual surrenders their own prejudice_

Quite as soon as he had read the final words the edges of the paper had curled in his hands, burning to ash without a flame until all he held was grey dust. But he remembered them still, and now it was the final line that scored itself over the page, again and again. Like many of that great, strange man’s words, they had a prophetic air. But he could not have known – even he, who had found him and followed him with his birds, perhaps by chance or perhaps in the same manner as Black, could not have foreseen the arrival of this long-estranged friend. And if it was to Black he referred, did he mean for him to forgive – to believe, and help, this convicted traitor?

Remus shook himself and fell back on his bed. The letter couldn’t have presupposed any such thing, for so many reasons. He decided that, most logically, his correspondent had meant for him to reconsider his own ‘prejudice’ before he condemned the officially sanctioned prejudice against himself. Not entirely fair, perhaps, given where the balance of power lay, but he was old enough to give some time to the thought. It went without saying that he hated hypocrisy in others, and now that he had learned some introspection he hated it in himself even more. But was it truly irrational to fear, to horde suspicions about the state, when he knew that for being what he was his freedom was severely limited, his movements immediately suspect and his condition itself shunned, and feared, and given little scope for treatment or care besides close surveillance? He could not believe that this was for his own benefit.

It was from this mindset however that he wished to escape, and the opportunity to do so had presented itself with this offer of a teaching position at the only place he had ever felt safe, and made friends, and occasionally excelled. It was the man who offered him the place whom he had to thank for that, and once the offer became a demand he had realised how foolish he would be, and how stupidly proud, to turn it down. So, he knew he would accept – but possibly the factor that had ultimately decided him was the information that as long as he worked at Hogwarts, he would be treated, and not blamed, for being a werewolf.

He pried off his shoes and kicked them away over the edge of the bed, jarring slightly at the wooden sound of their landing on the floor. He curled his toes and groaned – a long, aching sound to match the sensation. It was nearing the full moon. His body rebelled against the imminent ravishment it would inflict on him. And he couldn’t sleep just as much as he could not ignore the terrible dilemma: he had as good as accepted the offer of a job, one which was too good for anyone in his position to hope to receive; yet for so many reasons he could not travel north, could not justly send an owl bearing news of his acceptance, while a man who had sworn death on _someone_ at that school sat in his bath. His escape was considered a breach of international security – after all, it was certainly the least of the ministry’s fears that Black might attack a schoolchild. What was he, in their eyes, but a rogue agent of the darkest league imaginable? Why else, how else should he escape that most formidable place, except with some plan to resurrect that darkness?

To Remus the notion was unthinkable, torn as he was as to Black’s true loyalties. He had certainly been branded a Death Eater in the papers after his arrest, because who wasn’t in those days? A man who would sell his friends to Voldemort could be nothing else, surely – but not to Remus. He did not think that even the Sirius Black who had murdered thirteen bystanders would have been lured by the darkness except as a means of survival. When he had known him as – as a good man – even then he had a tendency to show off, to try and prove his own ability. He would not have very easily been coerced into following submissively, especially by someone who represented those ideals he had so despised in his own family.

Remus twisted, turned on his side. Sirius – the good and unquestionably loyal friend who had died as he was, for Remus could not bear to think of it another way – had done all he could to reject the unpleasantness, the bigotry and the suspicion that hung over the Black name. He had been so anxious to rid himself of that stain that, once he had grown out of some of his adolescent pride, he began to take the opposite path entirely – that of the brave, good, reckless soldier. Remus could not believe that the eleven year old Black’s hatred and fear of his family name were an act. He could not believe that a boy would cry one night because his mother’s last letter had asked him not to come home for Christmas, and yet grow up to embrace his parents’ ideals and even surpass his brother’s zeal by abetting the attempted-murder of his infant godson.

He shuddered and pulled at the coat he was still wearing; he could not extract a plausible narrative from the paradox. No matter if Black was the traitor the world thought he was, Remus could not believe that he was motivated by any sympathy for the dark side. It must be cowardice and self-interest, plain and simple – and yet in that case, what did he have to gain by selling himself to Voldemort, who had little use for others’ self-interest? He would have to serve one side or the other in order to be protected.

Then why not run away – disguised, entirely invisible as a dog? No, Black could not stand to hide. He needed to act, and Remus was certain that in the past he had acted with little concern for his own safety. No – nothing of Black’s alleged crimes matched his character, as Remus remembered it. To hide – to run – to sneak about and lash out in self-defence, simply to silence witnesses, indifferent to ideology – it all seemed like the actions, the mentality of another person. Sirius would have died, Remus (at twenty-one) was certain, before he reverted to family tradition and sold out his friends to court favour with genocidal fanatics. Suppose fear and war had changed him – Remus could then at least understand his reasoning for exposing James and Lily’s whereabouts, presumably in exchange for his own safety. But why would he stay in the open to go after Peter? What could motivate him, not merely to hand over his friends to be killed, but actually seek out a friend so that he could confront him, or kill him himself?

And there was Remus, who over those few days between the Potters’ deaths and Black’s arrest had been more or less in hiding, and utterly undisturbed. Surely (and Remus closed his eyes in shame at his arrogance), even in the murderous Black’s twisted mind, he could not have viewed Peter as more of a threat than Remus himself. Of course the printed story had claimed that Peter had in fact sought out Black to avenge their friends, but on this point alone, perhaps, Remus had no trouble believing Black. He could not imagine it that way, could not see Peter rising to the task of tracking his clever, traitorous friend and meeting him in the street, wand drawn, after he had so ruthlessly turned against his closest friends.

So Black had found him, and had intended to kill him from the outset – this much was probably true whichever version Remus believed. But one telling was no easier to believe than another. To Remus, the only motivation for killing Peter which made any sense was either a deep-seated loyalty for his disappeared Lord, or vengeance against Peter himself. Even then, Peter was of little consequence to the dark side, so much that Remus couldn’t imagine him having a valuable bounty on his head. And even in his self-hatred Remus was forced to concede that Black’s logic didn’t contradict itself. He couldn’t forget that, whatever he said, Black had had twelve years to concoct any story he wanted. But having started the slide of stones, they came now tumbling and pouring over the edge of the drop, and Remus could not rest and be content with what he thought he knew because he had lived with it longer. So, he thought uneasily of the only answer to it all he could think of – if the solution was to secure evidence, what better place than the school he was to start teaching at in a week’s time? The school where Black himself was heading for?

Remus knew it was criminal – it was unthinkable – to go there with such a motive, with the knowledge he now had, and keep it to himself as if proving Black’s innocence (or not) was a personal challenge. He could not take Black with him and come out alive – and if he lived it would be little better, being in prison, or even being just as he ever was, ostracized and unemployable. No, he would have even less, for no matter the general prejudice against werewolves, he had in his life done very little to secure the hatred and disrepute of his peers and betters at a personal level. This would be the end of that – but – if Black were innocent, could there not be something to salvage? If he were innocent…


	10. Chapter 10

Remus found himself opening his eyes to a room which was jarringly bright – he had slept without knowing, and before he could see the time he knew it was morning. He saw the same light under the bathroom door, still closed just as he had left it. Disorientated, he couldn’t be sure of the time, but it seemed possible that Black, like himself, had simply slept where he was. Remus couldn’t guess how long he had stalked across the country having swum god knows how far to the shore, couldn’t imagine the toll it would take with little sleep and less food, and the constant knowledge that he was welcome nowhere but dark corners; that he was being hunted. Well, Remus knew the feeling of permanent social exile, but he couldn’t say he felt truly like a fugitive. All he could guess was that momentum and desperation had kept Black going this long, and that the moment he paused, his body would force him to sleep, rest, and try and recover, before it allowed him to get up. And then Remus wondered whether the strain Black had endured until now might not have been too much to recover from – whether he might not open the bathroom door and find him dead – but somehow he knew that the man’s natural stubbornness would not allow him to die here.

He stood up, got used to his own weight on stiff legs and tired feet, and went for the bathroom door. He didn’t realise until he put out his arm to open it that he had slept without dropping his wand. It might as well have been another finger as he touched the damp wood of the door, nudging it open slightly. Immediately he saw the grimy sides of an empty bath and felt a similar emptiness in his stomach, moving now out of instinct as he turned his back to the door to look over the room behind him, looking for anything that might have moved. The discarded bags of food were still on the floor, looking as if they’d been chewed up. He could see nothing about the door or the window to suggest they had been tampered with, and they would take some strength to get through them without magic – a strength which he didn’t doubt Black possessed even now, if he needed it enough. But no, he couldn’t see any sign of movement, and so with caution and gritted teeth he backed through the bathroom door.

He met a slight resistance. He looked through the wedge of doorway and saw again the white (nearly grey) rim of the empty bath, and several clumps of black, wet hair that grew on it like mould. With his shoulder, he eased the door inwards another few inches, but once the gap was wide enough for him to comfortably step through, it hit something firm which gently pushed it back. Remus put one foot onto the tiled floor – wetness soaked immediately through his sock. He looked at the ground and it shone with puddles of brown, hairy water. Remus breathed heavily and pulled off his socks, feeling too tired, too ill and too sickeningly frightened to concentrate on a spell that could dry it all up. That sort of magic was unreliable and inconsistent, he found. Any magic designed to make human life more comfortable for the sake of convenience tended to lead to a progression of laziness, so that you would take your mind off whatever you were doing and end up setting something on fire. There was no ‘dry this sock’ spell; the magic had to be adapted to the situation, and if he was feeling lazy enough to dry the water off his sock rather than hanging it out to dry, he could end up with a shrivelled sock, or a dehydrated hand. So he went in barefooted, resigned to the wetness that clung to the bottom of his trousers.

At first he saw a towel in the path of the door, wet and filthy with yet more hair. Rounding the corner he started to kick at it, but once he was fully behind the door and could allow it to close, he took in a slightly sharp breath at the sight of the real blockage. There was the dog, its hind legs protruding from under the towel. The rest of it was buried out of sight, but its breathing was unmistakable. From what he could see, the dog’s fur stood up off its skin in a fluff, but it was so thin and patched that, now it was free of dirt, the red, sore skin seemed to glow underneath it. He could see the white of its bones through it. The undersides of its paws were blistered and cut. Remus looked at them and wondered, as he remembered doing in a far more careless time, whether Sirius felt the pain in his dog-body like he did as a man. Whether it somehow carried over into the other body, and whether he was just as aware of it as a dog. He only knew the pain of his own transformation, which left him altogether, along with most of his mind, once it was finished. He never felt pain as a wolf, but he never felt anything, except hunger. He wished he couldn’t remember anything about those times. He knew, at least, that he had never hurt a human – but he remembered how they smelled. How he salivated at the scent.

He noticed, then, the mass of hair in the sink. It almost spilled over the edge there was so much. Remus could see it wasn’t dog hair, but human, with blood among it as well in small splatters on the porcelain, and one of his razorblades in the middle of it all. It seemed an odd thing to take the effort to do as a dying fugitive, but strangely, Remus felt he understood. As a wolf, he felt like a beast. He lost control over his body, his shape, his humanity, and the hair he grew was the symbol of his animal nature. He could well believe that, had he been forced to stay in that form for days, or weeks, he could not have stripped himself of anything that resembled it soon enough. Even as a human, Sirius had been forced to live like an animal. He had lost control over those basic human things that Remus clung to as much as he could. Perhaps he couldn’t stand to be seen, smelled, thought of as an animal. Whether or not he was innocent, Remus recognised that need.

As if it sensed the sudden intrusion the pile under the towel shivered, and the end where its head presumably lay lifted off the floor. Remus heard a snort. Then the dog shook its head free, blinking at the light, and turned with guilty eyes to look at the other man. Remus shared its gaze without much feeling, thinking that if this dog were just a dog it might be nice to keep him, let him rest his old bones and sleep near his master’s bed. Both of them could have been made less lonely – but under the circumstances, he couldn’t let himself attach any emotion to this dog, even if, ironically, it was one of few dogs that could really comprehend it.

“Do you want some clothes?” He said hoarsely. The dog looked down, and in a second it was a man’s eyes Remus was avoiding. Remus started slightly at the shock of seeing a stranger, almost, curled up under the towel, for Black’s crude attempt at shaving had nonetheless taken years off his face along with the dirt. His hair resembled a horrible parody of his careless, boyish cut, falling just short of his shoulders with unfamiliar grey near the roots. But even if he looked less like the criminal he had seemed to embody, the man Remus saw was decades older, sicker, thinner and more exhausted than the friend of twenty-one he had lost twelve years ago.

“Surprised you’re still here,” Black said, putting a hand to his chin as if to remind himself of his newly human skin. “Thought you might’ve left me and locked the door. Waited for the manhunt.”

Remus pressed the knuckles of his thumbs into his eyes, wishing his head would have let him sleep again. He sat on the lid of the toilet and looked straight at Black as he held his wand between his hands.

“I meant what I said about protecting you. I’m not a… I’m not a hypocrite.”

The two of them shared an embarrassed sort of look, each of them almost forgetting that they weren’t seventeen and sitting on one of the school beds. But neither of them was smiling and neither knew what to say. Neither of them remembered feeling young. And Sirius was looking at Remus so unlike how that young boy, that impossibly cool and cocky young man ever did, with pleading and pain in his face.

“I told you the truth as well, Remus,” he said quietly, apparently uncertain if he should speak at all. “You don’t have to believe me, but… do you have any doubt? Are you _certain_ I’m lying, or I’m mad?”

Remus focused on his wand, running his nails along some of its cracks. He’d made them a lot deeper over the years out of anxiety but the wand didn’t seem to mind.

“I’m not certain. To be honest – I’ve got no reason to believe one story over the other. But – if you are telling the truth – how could I have possibly known what happened? You never came to me, you didn’t ask for my help or tell me what was going on. You knew I wasn’t betraying us then, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t come and find me, did you? I didn’t know anything. I didn’t feel like I could trust anyone, y’know, once one friend was a traitor. But I wouldn’t have… gone after you, not like that, if it was… Well, you’d be too good for me, Remus. I’m not a coward, but I’m not stupid. I went after him because I thought he’d be easy. And I really never thought he’d fight back. I don’t know, maybe that makes me cowardly.”

“Maybe. But did you think that that’s why I couldn’t come after you? Of course I wanted to find you, and look you in the face and ask you how this could possibly be true, but – I still feared for my life. It wasn’t like he disappeared, all the bad men went home and we all lived happily ever after. There was backlash, against _anyone_ who might even look like they might have been on his side, ‘cause by then the ministry was actually sanctioning the witch-hunts. That’s why you had no trial, isn’t it? And this was the early eighties, when werewolves were officially deemed incurably unstable. Those three women were attacked for being werewolves and pregnant. How many people were convinced we were all in league with him? And, really, when the bloody ministry was less supportive of us than the dark side, you can’t blame them. So, I couldn’t be seen near you under that kind of suspicion. And it wasn’t just for me. It was all werewolves, all the ones I’d found and talked to and convinced not to go over to his side. I didn’t want them all lynched.”

Sirius had closed his eyes. The back of his head was cold on the wall and his hair dripped down his neck with a shiver, and in a small void between waking and sleeping his mind pushed towards that of the dog, thinking of warmth in images of fur and heavy breathing. But he moved to shake off some water and his body was wrong, because, he remembered, he sat in his other body. And he couldn’t smell enough, but his mind was moving far too quickly, confused with language and humanity. The dog seemed more natural in this damp place – but he recognised the humming silence and realised he had heard an awful truth he couldn’t properly comprehend, and Remus was waiting for a resolution. How to conceptualise a few disturbed images as words?

“We were on different sides, really,” he said at last in a sleeping voice. Remus made a sound of trying not to speak. “Different sorts of opinions about what… winning, and loyalty, meant. My enemy was pretty clear to me. I don’t think I realised you weren’t fighting for… things to go back to normal. I was wrapped up in a hero complex. I s’pose it was, like, me against my family… and for you, it was – you against everyone on the outside.”


	11. Chapter 11

They found they were looking at each other again in their small silence, but differently. Remus watched Sirius, rolling his wand between his palms, and thought that he was experiencing a strange sort of recognition. He saw Sirius as the man he was now – not the young man, the teenager, the child, or the enraged and murderous traitor, but his old friend grown older. This was something he had never really considered, since he had trained himself to remember Sirius as a dead friend, a still image. But he had grown in twelve years. To hear him acknowledge that steep divide that Remus had always felt between himself and his peers was, in some way, a bitter relief. Remus had borne the guilt of feeling that he was, as Sirius had said, fighting on a different side from his friends. That was the divide which made him insecure in the establishment, which drove him to vocally question and suspect any official network and which had, he felt in hindsight, only weakened himself and those closest to him. To hear it acknowledged that his insecurity was understandable, perhaps justified, was in some way freeing even now.

“You’ve been sleeping for hours and you look more tired than me,” Sirius said in a cracking voice. Remus raised his head – he had not felt himself resting it on his hands. “It’s not tonight, is it?”

“No. A few days, though. But – I suppose you know, if that’s how you tracked me down – there are quite a few of us around here, so I won’t be alone. I’ve only been in this place a few days. I was a bit further South until – I had to go, and it was recommended.”

“It can’t be common knowledge outside of werewolves, this place, or you’d have no peace and quiet.”

“It’s not. It’s sort of unspoken between us, even, but it’s a kind of community. And I was never keen to segregate myself any further, but like I say, I had to move.”

“Good timing, then. I’d been hanging around here for almost a week. But – well, it’s probably not the best time to be asking you personal questions.”

“What? Why did I move?”

“Well, I was going to ask what you’ve been doing to make you so tired.”

“Oh.” Remus looked at his hands – which he still hadn’t washed. Most of the dirt, blood and other grime had worn off, but his fingernails told a large part of the story. Raising his eyes, he looked at Black and tried to gauge what his look was asking. Having asked so much of his storytelling abilities, it might be hypocritical to refuse to answer his questions, but nevertheless Remus could not retire his deep suspicion. It was an age-old tool of manipulation to lower your interrogator’s guard by coaxing them into being open themselves, establishing an unconscious feeling of trust you can exploit. Remus had always known Black to be a fighter rather than a manipulator, but the contradiction there was that, if he was a liar, he would always have lied about it. It was quite a delicate move Remus had to make in order not to compromise his own honesty, but for whatever reason, he felt at ease in this cold room, talking quietly and unspooling a story that he had wrapped around himself quite tight, and hadn’t yet had the chance to unwind.

“I can’t say a lot. I know some people – a family. Not necessarily what you’d call friends, but we have a relationship of… mutual trust. We’ve helped each other in the past. I think most of the time we prefer not to associate, since we don’t tend to embrace the… well, the werewolf community. My reasons might be a bit cynical, but – they’re Muggles. They don’t really have a place anywhere. Doesn’t really matter how we know each other, but I heard from one of them the other day. Barely a day after I’d got in here, and I’d been on the streets for a bit before that, so I wasn’t exactly well-rested.”

“How did you hear from them, then?”

“Well… living around Muggles for a long time, I’ve used their technology sometimes. And I have this – you’ve been in Azkaban before the internet existed, haven’t you?”

“The what?”

“Like an electronic – communication system. Doesn’t matter really, but I’ve used it occasionally. It’s quite useful, ‘cause as far as I know the ministry doesn’t keep much of an eye on it. Anyway. I couldn’t sleep the other night. I’ve been tired for a long time and sometimes it doesn’t matter, I just can’t sleep. I ended up going out and found a place with a – machine that – well, there was a message. One of them had asked for my help ‘cause they don’t know anyone else. It was sent a couple of weeks earlier and I knew it wouldn’t help to reply so I just went, and it was too late. This boy had bitten his dad – the boy was born with it, his mum had had it for a few years, but he, the dad, didn’t. That’s what he said in his message, but when I got there it was just her and the boy. His bite was infected – and the bite affects you straight away. His body couldn’t handle it and she said it was like he was rabid, he ended up aggressive and, while he was dying, he attacked the boy. The boy died yesterday morning. I’m not a healer, I couldn’t really do much, but obviously I helped put him out of pain. And then I helped her… clean then up. So when they were taken to be buried, it would seem as if they’d died of illness. They live very rurally, it wouldn’t be thought of.”

Remus was absently scraping his fingernails clean, and when he realised that was all there was to tell he closed his eyes for a few, long moments. He felt the aching of his body, punished by two days without sleep, more clearly than he felt any emotion. He remembered something draining in him as he read the message but not any particular feeling. It was the sort of work he was often expecting to have to do, really, and even to him, the moment there was a _bite_ as a major event in someone’s life, part of their identity was replaced by a ticking clock. Remus couldn’t live too much amongst people he saw as a herd of clocks.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius said flatly. Remus couldn’t be bothered testing his sincerity, and just for something to do he pointed his wand at the sink and started to singe away the clumps of hair. An awful smell came off it as it burned. “Will the woman be all right?”

Remus shrugged; that was as much as he knew.

“As all right as any of us. She’s always preferred being far outside the rest of the world, understandably. But it’s up to her. I can’t help, no one else can help, and that’s how it is.”

Now, Sirius had no trouble fixing his gaze on Remus. He was almost a stranger to him now, but Sirius didn’t remember knowing this man who was so cynical, so downtrodden, as to entirely write off another person’s life as out of his hands. He imagined there were a lot of details carefully left out of his story, and it was entirely emotionless, which Remus wasn’t. As much as there was an enormous wall stretching between them now, built high over twelve years, Sirius was here because he wanted to look over it again and see a pair of eyes he recognised, eyes he remembered with love. Love was something he hadn’t been allowed to feel for a long time, and to see Remus forcing that same emotional imprisonment upon himself was concerning. More than that, it was cowardly in a way – but nonetheless, it was a means of survival, and Sirius had no way of knowing what Remus had had to survive. So with a confused but desperate clutch on some notion of love for his old friend, Sirius kept up his eyes and focused on a few words.

“I know you’ve been alone about as long as me – not in the same way, but in a sense. It’s different when you choose it. She didn’t choose to be alone, and… you don’t deserve to have to be –”

“As far as I’m concerned you don’t have the right to tell me anything about it.” Remus didn’t look away from the sink, but his voice carried all the authority he could have put into his body. Sirius paid it little attention.

“I made myself free to reclaim my humanity, Remus. You’re human as well. Honestly, it’s a bit sickening to see you make yourself less like one.”

“Yes, well, I’ve been trying to claw back some sense of my humanity since I was six years old, and nothing about the system we live under has convinced me I deserve to be treated like one. Do you want me to stay with this woman, and – I don’t know, get married? Yes, maybe I’d be a better person for showing empathy and compassion, but both of us, if I was with anyone, would be brutalised. By loneliness, resentment, bigotry, the physical effects… When I’m not afforded enough humanity for myself to live on, how d’you expect me to be that selfless? And – Black – thanks for your input, but when you’ve made any sort of effort to live in the world, talk to me about what I owe other people. I’ll help people and I’ll accept their help, but I don’t expect affection and I don’t give it much because I can’t afford, and I mean really can’t afford, with time or money or health, to look after anyone besides myself when I have nothing to fall back on. So I’d really appreciate not hearing about how I should live from you, who I have no idea if I can trust.”

“I’m talking about what you owe yourself, Mo – Remus.” The old nickname had almost slipped out, and Remus caught his eye with a slight jolt of surprise. Sirius looked almost guilty for it, almost afraid, for making himself too familiar. Remus couldn’t muster any outrage. He was thinking only that this conversation was absurd, that he was ridiculous for ever getting to this point. And he couldn’t see a way forward that would allow him to get on a train going north in just over a week’s time.


	12. Chapter 12

Remus looked again at his scratched hand and his scratched wand, and there was still no solution in them. Was it courage the wand gave him, or just an excuse to be cowardly? If he was forced to use his hands to get through life – like the muggle family, who took themselves away to the edge of the world so they could fight and live through a battle with a curse, and illness, with only their hands and their heads as weapons – he might do more, and think more, and decide in the way that Sirius had. He went walking through walls made of death just to reach a sea made to drown in, and he didn’t stop – he just decided. Remus never had. He had often marvelled at Sirius’ daring at school and asked him how the hell did you have the nerve to say that to a teacher? And Sirius would grin, lying upside down in an armchair, and Remus would roll his eyes and say idiot but he wanted some, any of the confidence of his friend –

“You might not trust me,” he said from the future, and Remus was anxious to forget the word friend as he looked at him. “But you did… tell me that story. You want me to trust you, don’t you? You – you still want me to care, don’t you?”

“S – Sirius – I told you those things because I didn’t want to make something up about where I was. And, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no secret to be kept. Not here, anyway. They’re too far away for it to ever matter who I tell. But – I can’t – hear those things from you.” He tried to make his mouth wet enough to find the words. “I don’t want to talk as if we’re friends.”

Most of the hair in the sink had shrivelled into dust and Remus turned on the tap to flush out the residue, and the spatters of blood along with it. He didn’t look at anything else in the room. Sirius didn’t speak but there was no doubt he understood. Only a soft growl floated up from his stomach, and Remus heard him grinding his teeth together against the pain of it, and whatever other pain his body gave him. Remus vaguely remembered eating at some point the day before but he never could eat much with the dread of a full moon, even knowing that the moment he transformed, his body – the other body – would feel the intense hunger of days without food enough to kill for it.

“Then the only thing I’ll say is that you’re not really a strategist.” Remus pulled up his head which he had forgotten was a human head, so engrossed was he in wolfishness. Sirius’ voice was deep and caught in his throat, and he spoke with his eyes closed, but flickering. “You’ve never known how to act ‘cause you get too preoccupied with the outcomes, and the reactions. You’d rather defend against other people acting out, and, yeah, that’s all right, that might work for you. But it’s not gonna work now, when you’ve got me here. I can’t live here. You don’t trust me and I’m basically your prisoner, but – I’ve been a prisoner long enough to know – you can’t possibly keep me alive, and locked up, when you can barely feed yourself or stay awake for more than a few hours.”

He pulled the towel, caught full of hairs, up to his neck. He might have been shivering, and Remus hated to admit that he pitied him. It would have been so easy to make him warm and Remus couldn’t move his hand.

“I could’ve stolen your wand last night and apparated. I could’ve kept myself alive with it. But I’m not a person who – I’m not a traitor. I know you’ve got no idea what you’re going to do with me. And that can’t last. You’ll have to do something with me or I’ll die, or you’ll get caught. If you want to turn me in, you can knock me out and leave me in the middle of the road, and no one will know you had anything to do with it. Are you gonna do anything? ‘Cause I’m still afraid you might kill me, Remus. Not because I don’t trust you… just ‘cause you might end up with no other option. And whatever happens, I’m not sitting jail waiting to be executed. I’d rather die on the spot, or have to fight, or anything. And… if you can’t decide what to do with me, Remus, I can’t promise I won’t try and get out when I’m starving. I can’t – I can’t even promise I wouldn’t hurt you, if I was desperate enough. That’s not a threat, mind. Just realistic. So – I don’t know, you could wipe my memory, or –”

“And you’d forget whatever you did altogether, and there’d be even less proof of what happened.”

“Or just the memory of seeing the newspaper, if that’s possible. Hang on – is there any way – could I show you the memory? Y’know, with like a –”

“Even if we were anywhere near a pensieve, memory’s flawed. You could’ve just as easily hallucinated it, and you’d still remember it that way.”

“I don’t know, for – just do something! Please, Remus, hex me, force me to tell the truth. Force me to be a dog. Take away my voice, or paralyse me, stop me using my legs. Do something,” he groaned as he opened his eyes at last, “that will convince me you don’t want me to go to Hogwarts. ‘Cause I could if I was that cold-blooded, I could find a way. But, Remus, are you really just – going to keep me with you? Are you – that lonely?”

“I know you’re trying to provoke me,” Remus said with a harsh sigh, keeping his eyes low, at his feet.

“Yeah, ‘cause I want you to do something. You can’t sit there forever, Remus, neither can I. You can see I’m dying, can’t you? As far as I’m concerned I’ve made breaking out worthwhile just by talking to you, ‘cause even if you don’t believe me yet, you’ll find out –”

“Silencio,” Remus managed with barely a breath, and even if he was too weak to make it very effective, it shut Sirius up at once. In the first moment there was relief – but Remus couldn’t look at him. He couldn’t look at his wand or his hands, and hearing any more words was impossible without losing his composure. He couldn’t tell if he was closer to crying or screaming in fury, or if his lack of breath was a symptom of rising panic. But he had built himself on remaining calm and there was nothing more important for his survival. He closed his eyes hard and kept still.

There was a sound, a shift in the space in front of him, and Remus looked blinking into the face of a dog. It blinked in reply. Remus wished again with a burn in his throat that it was just a dog. Looking at an animal face was comforting, somehow. In those moments of silence breaths came a bit more smoothly, and with a small space to think, Remus went through thousands of words. There was no right answer, but just an answer was enough. He decided.

“All right – I’m going to talk for a bit, now, and I want you to stay like that.” The dog twitched its head and lowered its eyes, submissive. “I’ll get rid of the spell and you can stay like that while I’m talking. But we’ll go back in there, it’s freezing in here.” Remus stood in a rush of blood and the dog, unprepared for sudden movement, struggled onto its feet, all the towels falling off its back along with clumps of damp hair. In the light of the other room Remus saw how much it shivered as he fell back into the only chair, the dog sitting obedient and soundless on the wooden floor. It hurt to look at the thing like that – the creature so much like a wolf, like the dying child who cried and pleaded as his half-wolf body made him lunge at anything living, needing to taste blood. The awful, dying thing.

“Get on the bed if you want. Get under. Might as well not die of the cold.” The dog looked at him, straightening its back for a moment. Remus noticed its tail lift off the ground. “It’s all right. I just need you to listen.”

The dog couldn’t voice its thanks, but it thumped the floorboards with its paws and wasted no time in leaping up to bury itself under the blankets. Wordlessly Remus lifted his spell, and a second later the dog stuck its nose over the edge of the bed, its black eyes glinting from the shadow of its nest.

“Okay. Good.” Remus succumbed to gravity and slid downwards in his seat, never far from the thought of sleep. Still, he made an effort to look the dog in the eye. “You know why I can’t trust you. I’m sure you can’t expect me to. But, honestly, what you’ve told me – would make sense. It would make sense for the sort of person I thought you were, and if I could believe you were a murderer, I could believe it of almost anyone. And it really seems… if you wanted to kill me, you could’ve done. If you wanted my wand, you could’ve taken it. You didn’t need to come here at all. Maybe you’re just gaining my trust so I can help you, I don’t know, but – the sort of person who kills thirteen people and just stands there doesn’t need that kind of elaborate plan. There’s so much to doubt but I really, honestly can’t convince myself what you’re saying is impossible. And it would be so tempting just to give you up and let the ministry deal with it, but I don’t trust them to find out the truth either way. I think they’ll kill you and leave it at that. And I don’t believe in death as a punishment, really, as fitting as it might be for some people. So. That’s why I’m telling you what I’m going to tell you.

The dog was still and flat, apparently waiting, seeming to lie in suspense of Remus’ pause. Remus looked for words in his dry mouth and held his wand in both hands. For a brief moment, he looked out of the blue window.

“I suppose this isn’t really a secret – not public knowledge, but y’know, not a secret. Private, really, at least until I’ve officially confirmed. But I’ve been offered a job.” The dog raised its ears, indicating faint surprise. “Obviously that makes thing difficult for… whatever this is. But what…” Remus took his wand into his right hand, nervously straightening it, anticipating a reaction. “What I really need to tell you is… well, it’s dangerous. I don’t want to. I’m worried about myself and the consequences it might have for me, ‘cause even if it doesn’t get me killed or put in prison, no one will touch me. This job is pretty much a miracle. I’ll never have another opportunity like this. But – you’re right, something has to happen. This is probably the closest thing to a, well, plan I can come up with. And I can’t really say, like, if I tell you this, you have to do what I say. ‘Cause I have no way of trusting that you will. But my other options are either – stay here and try and keep you prisoner – or try and turn you in without getting us both killed. And I’m a coward, honestly, and I’m not in a position to be anything else. How am I supposed to approach authorities without rousing suspicion immediately?"

Remus turned with a twitch again to the window, and it was disturbing to see a pale morning outside. This sort of scene belonged in the night, in obscurity and dark, and yet the Earth had turned regardless.

The dog gave a dim bark and Remus came back from a slight daze. He looked the dog in the eyes. Suddenly the present seemed sharp, the urgency of the moment pressed into the next moment and he caught his breath, self-conscious and fearful. He sensed that he was on the edge of a mistake, one which he had had no real choice in making. But if this all turned out as a mistake, it had begun when he dragged Black inside, when he chose to maintain this tense encounter rather than cutting it off. All right then. He put his teeth together and decided.

“The job is... teaching. At Hogwarts.”


	13. Chapter 13

The dog reared, growling, rising up and pulling Remus’ bedsheets with it like some sort of wretched ghost. Remus didn’t have to raise his wand hand far to make his point, already sweating in anticipation of a struggle. The dog did not lower its hackles.

“I can see why you’d react like that, but I could hardly have mentioned it before. And – I can make you forget I ever told you if I have to. So listen. I haven’t sent a letter with my confirmation yet, but that’s what I plan on doing in a few days’ time. There’ll be an owl. I’ll have to write back that I’m coming, and needless to say it won’t be a good career move if I start off by hiding the fact that I’m sheltering a dangerous criminal. So… I’m going to tell Dumbledore.”

Remus put so much tension in his wand arm that it ached, there was a cramp in his palm and numbness everywhere else, but the dog didn’t move. It was looking down the length of the wand and its eyes were red. It didn’t move.

“D’you understand? I’ve decided. Make a sound so I know you get it.”

It stood and its fur waved over its shivering skin. It didn’t move, and Remus couldn’t feel blood in his arm, and he wondered – _what have I done_. It was such a wild animal and it had seen death. He could almost see his own death, his own blood, in its eyes.

The dog lifted one front paw – Remus almost went to his feet but he held himself, twitching in his seat – and touched its nose. Remus let out breath like a laugh that shook him at the dog that was once sixteen and would touch its paw to its nose when he was about to transform. It was a rush, euphoric, to laugh so unexpectedly, and in that second of a high he believed his friend, he knew who he was – but the man had appeared again and he couldn’t smile. Remus reminded himself the man was a stranger, and neither of them acknowledged the laughter.

“All right,” Sirius said with no voice, kneeling on the bed’s edge. Remus recognised despair in his limp body. “Is that the whole plan? They’ll be reading your letters y’know, they won’t wait for you to get to Hogwarts.”

“No – I’m not going to write, “By the way, Sirius Black stopped by the other day.” I’m... I’m going to tell him how much I appreciate the job offer – especially considering how much like _animals_ my friends and I were. I’ll say how guilty I feel about the trouble we caused, how I was – like a wolf in sheep’s clothing – and James was always horn-headed, Peter was just erratic, and it’s not surprising you went to the dogs.”

“That’s – no, that’s just ridiculous –”

“I’ve _decided_.” He didn’t have to raise his voice for Sirius to realise how little patience Remus had for ridiculousness. “It’s not exactly sophisticated but there’s no way he won’t get it. And I doubt anyone who saw it would come to that conclusion. Then I’ll say that I’ll be bringing a few creatures along for the lessons – and that’s true, I know someone who might lend me a couple of hers. A healer who, y’know, specialises in magical creatures. Including myself. But then I’ll ask him about pets, like, I hope it won’t be a problem if I bring one or two along – a dog that someone else has been looking after for a while – and a rat that I thought I had lost, but might be...”

Remus’ voice was strained with overuse, and now it failed him. He cleared his throat with a grinding sound and it made him cough, his face in the curve of his arm, damp air sucking the life out of him with every breath. He tried a sound and it was just raw. Putting up a warning hand to Sirius he found his way with blearing eyes to the bathroom and drank awful, grainy water from the tap – he’d drunk nothing, eaten nothing – and there was no mirror but he would have seen a man already changing, already decaying out of his human skin. He’d have to suffer it once more before he got to Hogwarts. But once he was there – if he ever made it – it was his oasis. It was his hope. But it was a terrifying hope now, because how could he walk through its entrance after all this?

He had to trust Dumbledore more than he could trust anyone, but surely, once Remus told him, he wouldn’t wait until the 1st of September. He wouldn’t sit in his study and wait for Remus to bring a convicted killer into his school. He might come here, or he might not waste his time and simply have them both arrested. Either way, Remus couldn’t see himself behind a desk very soon. There would be an investigation if he was lucky, and however morally dubious the Ministry could be, it would be a farce trying to convince them to scour the castle for every young child’s pet rat. Even with Dumbledore on his side... well, that was the only hope he had. Hogwarts was a dream. It was an impossible hope because of the impossible dog.

Wiping water off his face he went back, meaning to put the thought of hopeless hope behind him, but as he coughed onto the back of his hand and met the eyes of Sirius Black it slammed into him again. There was no way, was there? Looking at that bloodless, haggard face, Remus knew it. He wouldn’t make it to Hogwarts. He wouldn’t be safe. He wouldn’t be no longer alone and untrusted, because – his throat closed painfully around whatever sound he tried to make and furious for release he threw his whole body into his fist and punched at the bathroom door, forgetting the wand in his hand which must have drawn some kind of power from his anger, for his fist and most of his arm went through the door, splintering and scattering the wood without laying a scratch on his skin. But Remus looked at it, wrenching his arm free with a hoarse groan, and in slow bursts he started to cry because there was no effort he could make to impact upon the world around him like he could on that door. Not for himself, and not for anyone else.

“Remus –"

“No!” He spoke as if in a nightmare where his voice was gone, but he made sure Black could see his stretching mouth. “You’ve done – everything you’re going to do. You can’t undo this mess that you – so selflessly brought me into, because you wanted to be a man again. And I can only go forward from this moment because of that, I can only live with what you’ve made for me, so that’s what I’ll do. I’ll lose my job before it starts and I’ll never be trusted by the Ministry, whatever happens, but that’s the price for your attack of conscience, and I’m not enough of a coward to choose my own comfort over the safety of those children, or whoever else. So I’m going to tell Dumbledore, and both of us will deal with the consequences.”

He managed with as much coherence as possible through spasms of coughing and sobbing, and with the final word he lost enough breath that he fell against the wall, unbalanced on shaking legs. He didn’t care that Black could see him weak and crying. At that moment it was the only bitter satisfaction he could muster to think that if Black did have any of the honesty and humanity he had claimed, he would feel horrendous shame for forcing his friend – if that was how he saw Remus – to share in his infamy. But now that he had started to let it go, the emotion, the flood, Remus found himself dredging up the rest of the despair that he had been holding onto. In particular, the agonised ordeal of the last few days came back to him with new pangs of grief and guilt for what he could have done instead for that family, for every other werewolf he had met and tried to help and gone away from without changing anything. He hadn’t let it hurt before, numbing himself with the certainty that he could only look after himself in this environment, but now, faced with a situation he didn’t choose and couldn’t change, he hated every decision he had ever made not to act, not to change something for the better, and to simply go on as normal. He hated every moment of cowardice that had led him to this point.

He hadn’t exactly lied when he told Sirius the story of that family he knew – now just one, grieving woman – but he had been careful in what he admitted. He felt more for them than he wanted to, felt more than he showed about everyone he knew whose lives he couldn’t redirect, or make better, or save. It was true that he had read the father’s desperate message the other night when he had been woken up out of his bed and went wandering through the new town for something to do instead of sleep, but it wasn’t on the Muggle internet. It was in a notebook he had had since he was at school, a notebook that, like the map and the mirrors and however many other things, he and his friends had enchanted in order to talk and sneak about and distract one another in lessons. Remus had kept his much longer than he should have done, kept it after each of the three people who had also had one were dead or something worse than dead. That wasn’t something he could admit to this strange, spectral version of Sirius.

And when he had met her – a meeting which consisted of his friend, the healer, apparating in front of his door with a barely conscious woman on her arm and pleading with him to talk to her because she was suicidal and had been overheard in the street by a Ministry official claiming she was mad because every full moon she thought she was turning into a wolf, and thank god the Ministry worker had taken her to St Mungo’s rather than simply wiping her memory and leaving her there – well, at the time it felt like the least he could do to rip the notebook in half and give half to her, with the promise of help if he could manage it. She wasn’t exactly a friend after that, but she meant something – enough that he wanted her to have that trust in him that he had put in his friends. And he had thought that that family represented something good he had done, and not just for himself. Now, he couldn’t quite believe that he had done any good. Was it enough that she and her family were something he had tried to help, even if only with words – and a spell or two near the end?

He couldn’t have done more when they met; she and her husband were determined to have a child, and they decided they would live with the illness, and its consequences, as best they could. He couldn’t have given them more protection – of course, they were put under Ministry surveillance from the moment this freakish Muggle werewolf had been found, but aside from being told to live as far away from other Muggles as possible, they were mostly left alone. Remus knew that his healer friend visited them when she could, and she had been there before he arrived the other night, finally leaving when there was nothing more to be done, and the mother asked to be left alone with her son. Remus wasn’t sure why she had let him in; maybe only because she knew that he was part of the same world, where death was half of your identity. And Remus knew he could have done more, but there were so many others – not to mention himself – who survived by leaving the rest of them alone, escaping attention, avoiding crowds. That was how that family had been determined to survive. And even if he was braver, less defensive, more determined to change something, he couldn’t have prevented any of it; he would have been transformed himself at the same time the child bit his father, and if a healer couldn’t save either of their lives, neither could he. In the end, he wasn’t responsible for their lives. He told himself that now, said it over and over to himself as he spat out a few more tears.

After a few minutes of growing calmer and quieter Remus muttered “Reparo” and watched the pieces of the wooden door shuffle mostly back into their old places. He never could master that kind of magic. Didn’t it seem fitting that defence was his speciality? It was the recourse of the cynical, the afraid, the selfish, to learn to defend before looking for a solution to the problem. But then, he thought, pushing back part of the depressive cloud that was clinging to him, there would always be the need for defence, for protection, against certain things that would never change. There was maybe nothing he could have done for that boy and his father, but the boy hadn’t died in pain, and his mother was still alive at all, thanks in some small part to Remus helping them in some small way. Maybe not enough, but some way.

Maybe the only thing he could have done was to keep a better eye on that notebook – but the other night was the first time he had picked it up in weeks. It had been left with the rest of his personal things in the house that was his childhood home and where he sometimes visited or even stayed when it seemed safe. In fact, it had been left there after Remus heard about Sirius’ escape, following a (maybe irrational) surge of paranoia that it might be dangerous for him to be found holding onto anything relating to Sirius – after all, their messages from school were in there, still intact. But finally he did visit the other night, simply to see what he could find in the boxes and cases which lined the walls that might have been useful if he did decide to take the job at Hogwarts. Of course, he had been quite quickly distracted once he found the notebook, and he hadn’t thought to go back there once it was all over. He tried to remember what he had done with the place, if he had left it secure – it was abandoned and boarded up, but had he secured it with magic?

There was nothing of any real interest to thieves, but he kept most of his life there, his qualification records and his medical records and his records of werewolf identification that he was forced to keep by law but which he refused to have nearby. If someone from the Ministry decided to check on him, they would find those records neatly ordered, but not him, as he always happened to be visiting a friend or away with work, and yes of course he always came home for the full moon but he did like to keep busy the rest of the time. After a while it was just too much hassle to chase him down when he really hadn’t done anything wrong, and it had been two years since he had run into a Ministry official. Still, it worried him to think that the house could be open to the world when the Ministry might decide at any moment to make him a person of interest in their hunt for Sirius Black.

“I think I might –” He had forgotten that he had lost his voice, and whatever sound he made didn’t quite separate into words. He cleared his throat loudly and Sirius, whom he only noticed now was sitting hunched against the foot of his bed, looked at him with a start. They had both forgotten the other, and their eyes were warier now as they met. “I might have to go for a bit. Y’know, get some more food. You’ll have to...”

He made a vague gesture, the meaning apparent in his hard expression. Sirius stood up unsteadily, apparently quite keen to follow orders. Remus saw redness and damp in his eyes but they were firm, not faltering. Remus held up his wand.

“You’d better change.”

And there was the dog, looking up and shivering slightly. Remus almost wished for the man’s eyes again, but maybe neither would make it any easier. 

“Somnus,” he said in his cracking voice, and maybe because of that he felt a slight resistance in his wand, as if there was some blockage in the flow of magic – but in a moment the dog slumped, deeply asleep. He looked at the animal, completely helpless, and felt very uneasy standing over it.

What was stopping him from turning him in now? Or writing to Dumbledore immediately to see what could be done? Was it that he had given his word? Or was it simply terror at the thought of his next move – wanting to put it off as long as possible, to preserve this twisted kind of peace for just a few days more. With mechanical efficiency he locked the doors and the window from the inside, and at last, preparing to apparate, he looked once more at the sleeping dog and sighed – before flicking his wand and lifting the animal quietly onto the bed. It didn’t flinch at the loud crack as Remus split the air and went.


	14. Chapter 14

The air was suddenly wet – Remus tasted it and smelled it before his body fully came back to him – and then out of the crushing blackness he saw grey, white, a colourless mass of fog. The end of August didn’t mean much to this cornered little valley. Still, the fog was useful for appearing out of nowhere. Remus turned a few times to orient himself, looking for the highest arch in the hills, and once he recognised the shape of the land he set off downhill towards the muffled and distant rush of cars.

Few by few trees gathered as he walked, and the fog dispersed enough that he could see the path through the small forest that bent around the base of the hill. He didn’t walk along it but he kept it in sight. It was only a short walk as he had apparated as close as he dared, but he found himself rushing, breathing heavily in the cold, and chasing away a sort of dread he couldn’t name as he went. He was always careful with the house, careful enough to go there as little as possible, careful enough to keep it undisturbed, but it was a troubling thought that a whim had brought him there the other night, and urgent business sent him quickly away, distracted – he couldn’t put together a pattern out of it all but maybe nothing more than superstition told him there was something to be wary of.

He was out of the trees, listening to the road, and he saw the roof just down the slope that stretched out of the forest. He was coming from the back through coarse moorlands, and the first drop in front of him was rocky, quite sheer and steep, and not suitable for hiking. Thankfully, Remus was only planning to go down, and he didn’t need to worry about climbing. He simply jumped after murmuring a couple of words and landed softly, pushing his wand back up his sleeve as he found his feet. From there it was just a walk, and wooden fence to step over that he didn’t quite need magic to surmount. The land within belonged to the house, and it was dirty, overgrown and neglected to match. Still further down the slope he began to see the road, but now that he was past the fence he wouldn’t be seen thanks to the disillusionment charm he had cast around the perimeters. It wouldn’t do much to disguise him from anyone who knew he was there, but it meant that a Muggle family passing in their car wouldn’t notice the strange man coming down the hill towards the old farmhouse and wonder if they should let the local police know.

The closer he came to the house the more he was forced to watch his feet, stepping over piles of slippery, rotting wood and watching very carefully for nails, or broken glass, or Muggle syringes. When he’d first found the place again as an adult – he and his parents had abandoned it when he was very young and he suddenly became a walking biohazard – he’d walked over plenty of the things. He tried not to move things around too much in case the place became more of a tourist attraction for seeming to be haunted (also one reason why he never used it at the full moon), but he cleared those away if he saw them. Nothing seemed to have come or gone since the other night, however, and he reached the back door unscathed. But it wasn’t drug users in the garden that worried him. At the edge of the house they would be turned away by the gentle insistence of another charm – unless, of course, they weren’t Muggles.

He didn’t often manage much in the way of entertainment, but he would occasionally spend enough time in the Muggle world that he ended up at the cinema or in front of a television, and as he stood just beside the back door, out of the view of the boarded-up kitchen window, he had the image of one of those American Muggle characters backed up against the wall, holding up their gun as they prepared to storm the building. It was ridiculous enough that he smiled at the thought. Humouring himself, he held up his wand in the same way, knowing it was a useless position to be in if he did actually meet someone inside the house, but considering the likelihood that he was only being paranoid, he might as well look like an idiot as he went in. He checked the door first – still locked, though any wizard could have done it – and stepped back slightly so that he could tap his wand against, not the door handle, but one of the bricks just to its right. With that, the wall moved itself aside, and he pushed himself through the narrow gap that formed next to the doorframe. If wasn’t an original idea, of course, but it was very useful, and once he was inside the kitchen and the hole had resealed he was able to examine the undisturbed door itself.

There was more than one way to magically force yourself into a building, and Remus didn’t have the capability to completely defend the place – and since he was constantly skirting the border of criminality, he didn’t much want to take the final step and set up dangerous traps for anyone, including Ministry officials, who might want to come in. The best he could do was keep it all locked up, boarded over and as unappealing as possible, and make sure that if someone did use magic to get in, he would know about it. To that end, all the doors were enchanted to react to movement by slowly changing colour around one of the hinges, and the same around the window latches – hopefully not enough that any intruder would notice. He didn’t have to look closely now to see there was no colour change around the back door, around the kitchen windows or around the door that led into the shed. More than that, he could sense the familiar magic that he put in place every time he left the house, and although he couldn’t remember whether he had been as careful as usual when he left the other night, everything seemed undisturbed, the same as ever. He let his wand arm drop.

There were his boxes, his cases – most of his life, essentially, stacked by the opposite wall. They were the only thing in what once was the kitchen, now gutted and filled only with dim light. The other rooms had had the same treatment at some point, and Remus had kept them empty, not entirely out of cynicism at the thought of how little he was suited to having a ‘home’ but also because he had nothing to put in the house, or any house, except these cases. It was a practical choice when life was mostly about movement and little money.

He checked his watch – about ten minutes since he’d disapparated – and looked again at the doorframes, the walls, the windowsills, feeling very much on the edge of something. He knew there was no real reason he had come here other than a vague worry but now that he was here, it seemed too anticlimactic for there to really be nothing. He went into the hallway and came to the front door, kicked aside the couple of envelopes that had managed to be delivered through sheer determination in the last few weeks, and crouched down to squint at the lowest hinge. He couldn’t see a difference; he did, for a moment, see part of his face in the brass. A lovely sight, really, and he looked away gladly. After a couple of seconds’ concentrated scrutiny of the door he stood up because he didn’t know what the hell he was looking for and he was already under the suspicion that he was a ridiculous person in an equally ridiculous situation without all this playing detective. It he was any good at logical analysis he would have been a Ravenclaw, but as it was – well, he hadn’t argued with Sirius about being a terrible strategist.

Just to appease his anxiety that told him there must be something wrong he went through every room, checking the windows downstairs in the living room, in the upstairs bathroom and the bedrooms. He went through endless nothing in damp rooms that could have been in any house, there was so little attached to them now that he could relate to his childhood. It was only the window in his old room, now completely blind and boarded up, that stirred something in him. His attacker – his infector – had put his arms through the hole where there was glass and shaken him out of sleep, and Remus remembered the force of his bite. Like an animal or a monster that climbed the walls of children’s houses and hunted for blood, he had bitten him. But he was human.

Now that Remus was standing in front of the window that had once been the barrier between himself and his humanity he recognised the familiar disgust that other people must have felt towards him, thinking about the man who had bitten him. And he had a sort of revelation, that no one would be disgusted if an animal had climbed through his window and bitten him. A werewolf was frightening because it wasn’t an animal, and it wasn’t human enough. The weight of this thought sank into his stomach but he was too tired to dwell on the state of the human condition. Maybe it was the wrong moment for this level of introspection – but then, it was the wrong moments that brought it out in him. Remembering at last to check the hinges, Remus stepped forward, gave it a quick glance, and turned back rolling his eyes.

There was nothing else, but he wasn’t ready to go. He came downstairs and wandered through the rooms, ending up in the kitchen again with the vague idea of looking through some of the cases. He stopped just in front of them, however, thinking that now would be a good moment to check the notebook on the off-chance there was another message. He had kept it in his coat since the other night, and even though he knew the risk of keeping something like that with him, he couldn’t face missing another urgent note, however unlikely it was. He dug it out now and flipped through to somewhere in the middle; he saw the woman’s handwriting from a couple of years ago, followed by his own, and a few more notes between them until he saw her husband’s writing, about two weeks old. He had written the date at the top of the page as Remus had advised them, and he could see the shake in his hand from the numbers. He swallowed and turned the page.

There was nothing else written. What had he expected? He closed his eyes and shoved the book back into his coat. He didn’t want to see any more of the words already written in there. Instead, he faced the wall of cases and boxes, none of them labelled or particularly distinguished or helpful for finding whatever he wanted. He thought vaguely about books and notes and he took a step towards the pile – but then he stopped, and curled his fingers. What was the point of loading himself up with books when he didn’t know if he would even make it into Hogwarts? Anything he had like that he could find at the school if he really needed it. The only thing that might really be useful was some different clothes, particularly non-Muggle clothes. He looked down at himself, at his well-worn coat and his shirt with almost no matching buttons, and his trousers that had faded at the knees. He only had what he could fit in his small suitcase at the flat, and none of it would be much at home in the professional wizarding world. At the very least, Remus thought wryly, he could make a good impression in front of the Wizengamot.

He sat on the floor and started dragging cases towards him, looking for whichever one might have his decade-old robes stuffed inside. Books – impossibly disorganized folders of paper – a few family photographs. For a moment he stopped, remembering that he had come across them the other night but had only glanced at the one on top, which showed him sitting on his mother’s knee and laughing as he grabbed at her hair. His mother was smiling as well, and every few seconds she would take his hand in hers. He probably would have spent longer looking through them if he hadn’t then seen the notebook underneath the pile. Now, he just couldn’t face looking at himself getting older. He put them back, thinking that even if he never did manage to look through the photos again, he remembered them well enough after all these years of keeping them here, occasionally looking at them and making sure he still remembered.

A few more boxes and finally he found a crumpled mess of fabric in what must have been the oldest suitcase, since it was labelled ‘R. J. LUPIN’ in weathered letters. That could only have been his mother’s doing in preparation for school. She had excelled in magical typography, particularly when she worried about Remus losing his things – a not uncommon occurrence around his friends. Remus smiled absently, running a finger over the letters. With a sudden, inexplicable burst of inspiration he took out his wand and touched it to the letter ‘P’. With another touch, the same letter appeared again near the top of the case, only shining more, as if new. A minute later and there was a new word on the case: ‘PROFESSOR’. The ‘S’s were the hardest to replicate from the letters that were already there, but at the very least it was legible, and he smiled with unapologetic affection knowing that his mother wouldn’t have to worry about him losing anything at school. Finally he rubbed the new letters with his thumb until they resembled the old, slightly dull in colour and starting to peel.

For a moment he was transfixed by the light that came off the gold letters. Moving his thumb again they seemed to flash from brown to white, and the flash stirred a half-sleeping image from the other night – opening his eyes and seeing the room blink, orange to black. It was the noise that woke him but he almost noticed the lights first, and when he went to the window he saw the car and recognised the sound as a car alarm. It went on for as long as he sat by the window, and then when he was getting used to it there came shouting from two men, and then a dog barking endlessly, until it was too much to try and sleep through and he gave up, threw on some clothes and disapparated.

Remus lifted his head, quickly straightening his stiff neck. He didn’t know what the thought meant but he had had a thought, and it gripped him in the wrong way. He remembered those men shouting, and from the brief, tired glance he had given them, they had seemed to be arguing about how to turn off the alarm. And neither of them had had a dog. At some point however a dog had appeared, and Remus remembered worrying vaguely whether one of the men was about to set the dog on the other. But he had never seen it, and he couldn’t make any sense of it but just the word, the thought of a dog made him wary, and reverberated with a sinister echo. No longer smiling, he stood up with the suitcase in his arms, muttered the usual incantations to keep up the protection, and gave one last look to the rows of boxes at his feet. Whatever else there was in there of sentimental value, it would have to wait. He wasted no more time standing before turning with a crack.

He landed unsteadily, about a foot away from the top of the stairs. It was a narrow area and it was a risk if you weren’t precise, but Remus didn’t have the energy to walk anymore and he was willing to gamble on being seen. Thankfully the place was just as dead as ever, and he made it to his door undisturbed. An anxious tap with his wand let him in, and there was the sleeping dog and the room around it, slightly paler in the growing light. For the first time it occurred to him that he should lower the blinds, and he did, making himself just a silhouette. Walking to the bed he dropped the suitcase and pushed it out of sight with his foot. He took his usual stance and readied his wand.

“Rennervate.”

The dog took a moment to realise it was awake, pawing at the bed as if it had forgotten the feeling of lying on something soft. Remus wasn’t waiting.

“All right, change. Quickly, please.”

“Okay, yeah, I’m here – didn’t you get any food?”

“Forgot my wallet. And I have to ask you something and I thought you wouldn’t be too busy.”

Sirius seemed disoriented, looking around the room as he sat up clumsily as if it had changed while he was asleep. When he fixed his eyes on Remus it was with trepidation.

“What is it?”

“The other night I was woken up by an alarm outside, and there was a lot of shouting and arguing so I decided to get out of the house. And I heard a dog barking, for quite a while. Just outside this window.”

Sirius was nonplussed. Remus twitched his wand arm, enough to focus his attention.

“What? There’s more than one dog in the world, Remus.”

“I’m not saying it was you. I don’t really know if it matters. But… thinking about it made me realise that I need to know a lot more than what you’ve already told me. So, come on.”

He gestured with his wand, and Sirius’s eyes told Remus he knew he had no choice. Shakily, he raised himself to his knees, coming up almost to Remus’ eye level in defiance of his own body which threatened collapse. It probably wouldn’t have been an intimidating position even for a man much taller and heavier than Sirius, and sinking into the bed only emphasised the weakness of his posture. Even so, Remus couldn’t ignore the hunger and the fear in his face.

“What d’you want to know?”

“How you found me, exactly. Who did you ask? Because that’s a very lucky guess for those wild wolves, there’s more than one city with a lot of us. Where did you go first?”

“I – decided to look for you about two weeks ago. I went to find Harry’s place first because I knew where he was, then I started for you.”

His eyes were still twitching, anxious to see the whole room at once, and seeing his nervousness only made Remus more uncertain, more tense. He made sure not to look away from Sirius for too long.

“Where did you start?”

“I just – I started from where I was, from Surrey. Went towards London, looking for –”

“So you just started interviewing people at random in the middle of the city? Wearing those Azkaban rags? Who would talk to you, who wouldn’t recognise you?”

Sirius was grinding his teeth and apparently thinking, perhaps wondering where to draw the newest line between truth and fiction. Remus was only thinking of questions, anything to draw out whatever was making Sirius so afraid.

“Or, you said you found a pack, or something, and they – what, just pointed you here? Where did you find them? How did they know to look here? And even with all of that, how did you get to this door, the door to this flat? How long did you know where I was? For all I know you were that dog and you’ve been watching me for days or weeks. Come on, there’s no time left for saving face,” Remus said, jerking his body rather than raising his failing voice. Sirius flinched. “So if you ever want me to trust you, I want to know.”

Sirius kept his gaze with difficulty, weakening in his resolve and his physical strength now that Remus was staring him down with such cold determination. Remus saw it in his impotent body and he took no pleasure, no vindication from that sight, but still, somehow, it meant survival. It was all he could see: the potential to survive longer, to remain free longer. Sirius twisted his body as if he could get out of the way of that look as he found his breath.

“Remus – are you really surprised if… I did lie, for the sake of smoothing things over? You were already pointing a wand at my head – and I didn’t lie, I… simplified the story.”

“So what’s the unsimplified version?”

“You – just think, first of all, what you’d do if you were me.”

“You mean if I had to avoid attention and suspicion, living on the edge of society?”

“I’m a wanted criminal, Remus!” It was a slight shock to meet Sirius’ eyes and see anger and incredulity that hadn’t died down in surrender. “I know you’ve been persecuted, but… I have no way of using magic. I can’t show my human face, almost anywhere. Except… y’know, underground. And as much as that prison gets into your head, you don’t spend that long there and not get to know a few things. A few people. And it turns out… a lot of werewolves would rather be criminals than outcasts.”

“I know that pretty damn well, actually, after however many years of dodging the registers because the Ministry likes to make that association.”

“Yeah, well.” Sirius looked away from Remus, yielding to the sting in his voice. “The point is, I… made contact with some of them. There was a guy in Azkaban, years ago, anyway, who used to go on about how he knew some people – werewolves – who were more or less for hire to… bite people, attack them, kill them, I don’t know. Well, you probably know. And outside of them there’s this whole subculture, y’know, a political sort of scene, underground. Literally – in the underground, in those Muggle tunnels. People who hate werewolves, or any… y’know, part-humans, who try and live in normal society. So I went…”

He stopped, once more losing his air and his nerve, and by this point Remus had lost patience with sympathy, with emotion and compassion. He wanted words.

“I’m going to save you some time,” he said through his teeth. Sirius didn’t look at him. He sat burying his hands in the old blankets like a child, and Remus stood taller over him for it. “I’m not looking to punish you, I’m not trying to shame you or prove how evil you are. I just want to be as objective as possible when it comes down to it. I don’t want to, just… trust, naively. Especially because I was always in denial about my friends when they were less than perfect, and it was bad for them and me, and –”

“You’ll never be objective with me.” Sirius said, quiet but unapologetic, leaving Remus slightly numb. “Look, there’s no shocking revelation. I got in some really… horrible, dark places. They don’t give a shit who you are. And ‘cause of that guy in Azkaban I knew a few names, and I met someone who had a lot of contacts with those groups, a lot like Death Eaters except they’re convinced that werewolves are a superior breed. And I said – I was looking for someone who was a traitor to their cause.”

“Did you use my name?”

Remus was standing stiffly but he was careful not to allow his body to pose a threat, keeping his wand low. But Sirius still couldn’t look at him. His eyes were wide and didn’t dare move, as if the question itself was enough of a threat that by remaining still he could avoid it entirely. Remus only had to speak the works more firmly.

“Did you use my name?”


	15. Chapter 15

He didn’t answer. His silence was enough. Remus swallowed. Somehow, even though he had had every reason to mistrust Black from the moment he first spoke, there was a pain in his throat that told him he had gone too far; he had listened to him, looked at him too much, and he had started to slip back. After only one night he was feeling the sting again, of indignation in the face of lies.

Remus stepped backwards, slowly, wanting to see the man in his full form and watch his body language as he asked his next question, but as he moved, Black froze. From sinking, limp, into the bed, he quickly straightened and lifted his head, meeting Remus’ eyes. It was uncanny somehow, seeing something like horror in his dead face, and Remus’s skin ran hot instinctively. There was so much fear and hunger in him.

“Where did you go just now?” He asked with barely any voice. His eyes were dancing again, and now Remus noticed him looking at the covered window as his breaths grew louder and harsher.

“I don’t think it matters. And you’re not in a position to ask questions without answering them.”

“Did you go to the Roaring Tunnels?”

“What?”

“Or did you – go to the Ministry?" 

“Why would I?”

“What’s your plan here, Remus?” His voice cracked horribly. He didn’t bury his shaking hands, his weak, liar’s, coward’s hands. “You disappear and come back asking questions. You closed the blinds. You’re trying to get me to say things you could have asked any time, but now you’re asking me in the dark so no one can see – you could have done anything before you woke me up, it’s like you need me to talk. There could be anyone listening. Did you go to the werewolves, the werewolf underground, the Tunnels? Did you bring them here to kill me?”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t talk to anyone. It’s funny how quickly you jump to conspiracy, Black, is it just the way you think?”

“But why all this? Why now? If it’s the Ministry, they’ll still kill me even if I confess. If it’s the werewolves, and they hear I lied to them, they’ll kill me. Is that what you want, Remus? Why don’t you just do it?”

“Black, calm yourself down.” Remus didn’t know how to instil calm in his current position except by lowering his voice. The result was more of a growl in his tight throat. “I’m the only one here, I’m the only one listening to whatever you decide to tell me, truth-wise. And I don’t know why you’re so worried about anyone else listening in when I have every right to be just as unhappy. You sold my name to some militant werewolves. You turned people against me, dangerous people, who should be my allies, and you’ve made it just that much harder for me to live in this fucking country. What else? Who else knows where I am? Is there any possibility I’ve made some new enemies?”

He didn’t need to raise his wand or his strained voice for Black to get the message. He lowered his restless eyes as if he felt shame. Remus had a hard time believing he felt anything but fear, but nevertheless, something had got through to him. His body wasn’t wild or hungry – wasn’t really anything. With a strangely detached stab of pity, Remus wondered when was the last time he had talked to another person without any threat of death hidden between the lines. And although, in truth, Remus had never thought of killing him, he couldn’t say he was afraid of using that threat to his advantage.

Black straightened his back suddenly – put his arms around his stomach like there was some pain – and decided at last to get on with talking.

“They – those werewolves have a list. They have the Ministry registers, I think, but they don’t know where they – you are. Not individually. And honestly they’re not too desperate to start hunting people down just because some stranger asks them too. I think they must have trusted I wasn’t undercover ‘cause I knew enough about from what I’d heard inside, but even then they weren’t just about to start hunting a random person for no reason. But... generally speaking, everyone has a price.”

Remus scoffed, growing more and more impatient as Black’s slow mouth found the words. He moved on his feet to channel his agitation, and in the moments he could bear to look at Black he seemed to stiffen as well, hardly oblivious to Remus’ mood. After a few seconds of silence it seemed clear that he was waiting for some reaction, and realising this Remus let out a harsh breath, pressing his hands to his eyes.

“Thank you for that revelation. I honestly assumed all these criminals were just giving it away, just... just get on with it.”

“Yeah.” Black tried to swallow again and Remus heard the rasp of his dry mouth. “So – eventually, I met someone who, y’know, had an easy enough price. He knew about this healer who specialises in werewolves. Apparently she does a lot of unofficial work, like, goes and talks to people living rough, so... she knows a lot of people. Werewolves.”

Remus had stopped moving. He was careful not to show it in his body but his shifting feet went cold as dread took over from impatience – dread, and the first wisps of anger at the mention of the healer, the perfectly convenient healer who could have been anyone – but in this world, in this story, they were not going to be just anyone.

“When was this?” He said, giving nothing away in his voice and fixing Black with his eyes.

“I think... a bit more than a week ago. Not really sure of the days.” He wasn’t looking at Remus, who stood very stiffly and watched Black’s hands more than his face. Remus took the opportunity to take a small step closer to the bed. “So… I had this person, the werewolf, go and see her, and – I couldn’t pay him, obviously, so he had me steal things for them all, some food, some money. It’s not too hard as a dog. And in return he went to see this healer to see if he could find out about you. I didn’t see him for about two days. I only waited because he’d put me up somewhere pretty safe. Then – finally, he got back, and all he said was that he managed to find her and convince her he knew you. Eventually she told him you’d recently moved up here, and…”

Black looked up from the holes in the blankets and started slightly, noticing for the first time how much closer Remus had come. Black met his eyes. He spoke looking at the wand in his hand.

“Remus – it was just a visit, just to ask questions. I wasn’t about to send some thug out to hurt anyone. I made sure this guy wouldn’t do that.”

“You’re just a master at winning the loyalty of violent criminals, then?”

“I – well – I can play the part pretty well by now. Been treated like one for long enough.”

“But you didn’t follow him, you have no idea what he did. You just trusted him? You gave him the benefit of the doubt because you’re the victims, really? Or did you see where he went and what he did?”

“No, but there’d be no point –”

“How do you know who he talked to or what he did to get that information?”

“He took a picture with this Muggle camera afterwards, he showed me, she wasn’t hurt.”

“Do you know what she looks like? Do you even know her name?”

“Remus, she’s just a healer. She knows you and a hundred other werewolves, what’s it to her if someone comes asking after one of them? I know you’re keeping a low profile but you’re not in hiding from the whole world, it’s not that suspicious just to ask. There are plenty of ways to fool people without violence. Or maybe he just bribed her, I got him some money –”

Remus moved before Black could register the change in his face, grabbed what was left of the dying man’s hair and wrenched his head back, exposing his neck. Black rolled his mad eyes and shouted _no, no no_ in a mangled voice until the point of Remus’ wand choked out the sound. It didn’t stop him from scratching at Remus’ arm with his cold hands as he breathed his animal noises.

“Do you know why I had to leave?”

Black opened his mouth and Remus saw his tongue moving, horribly dry and bitten, chewed at. He didn’t speak.

“The healer – her name’s Rhea, by the way – knocked on my door last week, the door where I’d been pretty safe for about a year. I had work. I had some legitimacy. And Rhea was my friend, one of the only ones. She told me someone had come asking after me. She didn’t want to talk to him but he kept asking, really casually, if she had seen me recently. She wouldn’t say anything so eventually he just told her – he knew who I was, and where I lived, and where I was working, and he knew that I wasn’t registered with the Ministry. He gave her enough details about me that it seemed like he was probably telling the truth. It sounded like he wanted to blackmail me. So she came to tell me I’d better leave for a while, just in case. And – she was scared. D’you understand? Black!” He roared his name and drove his wand with force into the flesh under his jaw. “Tell me you understand when I say that she, nothing to do with anything, _just a healer_ , was scared.”

“I under–”

“Get your hands off me, I don’t need magic to ram this through your throat. I don’t know what’s worse – you really being a murderer – or you being innocent, and begging me to believe you, and all the time being so selfish that nothing matters more than your _name_ , your _honour_. You want to be human again? How much sleep did you lose, asking yourself whether this innocent stranger could possibly be afraid, could maybe be scared of people she doesn’t even know, and still have to go out and do her job? She’s not a werewolf but to some people she might as well be, to the people who think it’s a waste of everyone’s money and time just keeping us alive. I’m just one of a lot of people she knows but even if I wasn’t her friend, she couldn’t just give someone my address like it was nothing. She doesn’t get to just leave her work behind when she goes home, she’s on guard as well. She can’t just take a bribe and get on with her day. If someone comes to her because she knows werewolves and asks where they can find one of them, it doesn’t matter if it’s my long lost brother just wanting a chat; she doesn’t have the luxury of not being suspicious.

“She’s scared before it even happens because people like you know that she, and not just her but anyone who knows werewolves, is an easy target if you want to find us. Why would anyone want to find us? Why would anyone want to find someone who knows us? Why would anyone be scared of someone with a disease that turns you into a murderous, contagious animal? Why would anyone want to hunt down a person that could blend in with the rest of the world, until one night when they become something capable of killing them, eating their children, and then getting on with their life? Even if it is somehow true that it was Peter who did all of this, you’re not innocent, Black. You’re obviously capable of getting what you want without worrying too much about strangers once they’re not useful. Even if this person, this werewolf, didn’t hurt her at all, just think – if he can find her, how many other people can?

“Oh, and you know what, Black – she was the one who recommended this city. How did your man know where I’d gone if I didn’t even know where I was going until she suggested it? Did he come back after she’d gone to see me and beat it out of her? Did he force her to come to me and tell me where to go? As it happens I know she’s alive, at least. You know that family, the family that’s just one woman now? Rhea was with them just before I arrived. She knew them, she helped them as well. I didn’t see her. Maybe she’ll avoid me from now on because she thinks just knowing me might put her in danger. Maybe she’ll avoid a lot more people, a lot more werewolves, and maybe some of those werewolves will hurt someone else or themselves or get murdered because they can’t get help. I don’t expect you to know what it’s like for us, Sirius, but if – if you are telling the truth – you’re still capable of hurting people. There are things more important than your own pride. Whatever terrible things you’ve been through don’t give you the right to swan through life like an arrogant teenager, like the selfish, self-absorbed child you always were –”

It might have been the tears, the pain in his throat or in his arms, the fact that he couldn’t be sure what he was looking at anymore as his vision was overtaken by the faces of his old friends, as children, as adults, dying, dead – whatever it was, it distracted him for the first split-second that he felt Sirius’ hair disappear from his fist. He looked heavily into the other pair of eyes which were either a man’s or a boy’s or a dog’s and no incantations came to mind even as the eyes blinked and became orange. That was one slight, suspended moment; long enough to notice, but not long enough to react to the furious, starving dog that snarled as it uncoiled and slammed its whole weight into Remus’ chest with its front paws.

The wall hit Remus’ shoulders and head before the rest of him hit the floor and when he could next breathe anything he tasted wet dog, seawater, hot, filthy breath. He looked through fuzzing black at the dog’s teeth, the closest thing to his eyes, and closed his hands around air. There was a heavy foot on his throat and he had no wand, no words. He closed his eyes and struggled for air and coherent thought, hitting nothing but bone and fur with his hands as he launched them pointlessly, blindly, at the panting weight on his stomach, until the animal’s paw on his neck was a hand. He managed to see a human blur that was facing away from him. Some small thing, like a rat, made scrabbling noises around his head.

The rat sounds stopped – the blur turned back – and it pointed his wand into one of his eyes. Remus felt nothing in his hands until he tried to move them and he realised they were being ground into the floor by Black’s knees. The wand hovered, and shook, and with pained focus Remus looked into the face behind it. It was still flickering; Remus couldn’t be sure if it was his friend. It only looked like grief for certain.

“Remus – it won’t work – you’ll kill me and I won’t, be able, to –”

The hand on his throat lifted, leaving damp heat. Remus’ only thought was breath as the hand touched him for a brief moment in the middle of his chest. His pulse leapt out at it, and Remus closed his eyes to breathe.

“I’m not bad. You’ll know at some point. I'll - you'll know, I just wanted you to see me, human. But - I’m more like my family than I…”

The hand touched the side of his face. It broke the surface of his skin into cold shivers because it was such a rare thing to be touched. He opened his eyes. There was no wand hanging over him. It was a relief like fresh air until the wooden wand tip brushed his temple, and the taste of air went dry. The hand touching his cheek was holding his wand. Remus found Sirius’ eyes and looked for his friend as the face above him opened its mouth.

“Obliviate.”


	16. Epilogue

The wand was hostile to Sirius’ touch, shaking his wrist with hot reluctant magic until the grey light blinked away and he dropped it with a gasp. Something went out his body – his hands quaked with the rest of him – he fought with his knees and threw himself at the floor, off of the body that didn’t move or see with its open eyes. It was only blank eyes for a few moments. There was no person in them.

Remus blinked. Sirius caught his breath with a sharp pain and looked at the door, wondering only how to run. But with equal urgency he turned his head back, thinking of the wand, only to see that Remus had closed his eyes. Sirius watched his chest sink, and lift, and knew somehow that he had given up the struggle to fight, to stay awake. Sirius hadn’t cast magic in so many years but it was familiar enough even now that he knew it had worked in some way, though he had no way of knowing what he had forced him to forget. He fought with his own breath and his running heart and let the tension sink out of his body as he thought.

Pain – a new burst of it, in his stomach, and Sirius finally moaned aloud as his body curled around it. The strain of keeping himself upright had been numbed by adrenaline but now there was nothing blocking it out. It was too much to move against. But he knew his body and he knew pain – and he knew it would be like lying down as the tide came in if he stopped to let the agony pass. He would wait, and he would fall asleep, and he would wake up too weak to find water or food if he woke up at all. He would die of resting. And he would rather die fighting, even running, than give in to exhaustion now.

He straightened his back, hands pushing hard into his stomach as if he could soothe the emptiness, and – just as he had begged Remus to do, he remembered, looking at his blank face – he decided.

“The rat. The rat.”

He reminded himself as he clutched at his stomach, bit his tongue, and lifted himself from his knees to his feet.

“The rat. Moony will – fucking Merlin – Moony’ll know.”

He looked down at him, sleeping for the dead. He had forgotten complex emotion in Azkaban, forgotten how to feel more than one strong urging thing at a time. He couldn’t name the feeling he had now; regret, and determination, and guilt and shame. He looked into the face of his only living friend and he could do nothing for him. Sirius covered his mouth, and his eyes, and tried to push away hair that he no longer had. He couldn’t help him. He couldn’t show him the extent of his remorse, couldn’t apologise, couldn’t offer penitence for his stupid recklessness for the thousandth time. He couldn’t make Remus believe him, believe that he had only ever loved him, even in his selfish, impulsive way. He wanted to put Remus to bed, but he couldn’t lift him. He couldn’t even do that.

There was no point fighting tears and he didn’t bother. He could do nothing. The most he could do was make sure Remus never knew he was here at all, hope he had put enough conviction into the spell that he wouldn’t remember ever seeing him, ever starting, maybe, to believe him again. He could only hope that Remus wouldn’t remember him – and that there would be a day when he could. When Sirius could look him in the face again and remind him that his love had meant more than all the vengeance the world could give him, no matter how pitifully he had showed it. And if he lived long enough for that to happen, he could only hope Remus would forgive him. He certainly couldn’t expect it.

He looked at his face for what he was determined would be the last time before the next time and there was too much to try and say after twelve years. Now that he couldn’t even hear him, it might have been worthless, but Sirius had to say something to put it all to rest for now.

“I’m sorry. Moony, I’m just... sorry.”

He stepped over Remus. In the bathroom the floor and the bath and the wink were grimy with his hair and the dog’s filth. When he had crawled into the bath it was already grimy; no need to make it sparkling. He put one hand over the hole that was his stomach and knelt over the bathtub to wash out the hair, and when that was done he groaned getting to his feet and lost most of his hearing in the rush of blood. He picked up the damp towel and shook off his fur before hanging it up. At his feet, hair and fur clung to the tiles and the bare walls. Taking a harsh breath, with a cold grip on the edge of the sink, he lowered himself to his knees again and the jolt against the floor was a blow to his seizing stomach. Air came out of him like a sigh but it was only because he was too sick to shout with the pain of feeling his body die. One hand on his insides, he scraped up the hair he had gleefully shed trying to look like a young man again, like a human. It went down the toilet. Sirius took no more time contemplating whatever the symbolism of that was because there wasn’t time, and the pain wasn’t about to hurry away because of a metaphor. He found his feet and scooped some water into his mouth from the sink before he turned around.

Remus was gone. Sirius lunged into the room, thinking a fighting dog’s thoughts and preparing his body for another transformation – but after a only a few steps he saw Remus’ wand on the floor, and his coat thrown off in the corner. He was in the bed, almost completely buried. Sirius couldn’t see his face. He looked at him – he looked at the wand, at his feet – and a moment later he was standing on four legs, taking refuge from that flood of emotion in the animal’s simpler mind. Feeling washed out, smells grew enormous. The familiar scent of the man in the bed was the biggest thing in the dog’s mind, and it would have called it bittersweet if it had the words.

The dog padded around the small room, sniffing for anything he, or it, had touched, that shouldn’t be there. Near the wall with the cupboards the smell of food was achingly strong, but the dog growled and faced away. The only thing out of place were the empty paper bags, which the dog took in its mouth and managed to stuff out of sight in a waste bin, the dripping smell of which was almost enough to take its mind off food. Finally, it made its way to the end of the bed where the man’s head lay, just a mess of hair under all the old blankets. The dog took in his scent once more – like books, water and mud – and decided that would be enough for now. The dog felt relieved for a moment from the scratching thing on its back, the rat’s claws. Then, with more ease than a human would have managed, the dog turned away and put the man out of its thoughts to look for the way out.

The door was locked with magic; the window was closed, probably too stiff to force, and neither the dog not the man was built to jump from the second storey. It had to be the door. The dog found the wand on the floor – he was a man again only for as long as it took to pick it up, point it and say the words – and in a rush it was a dog again, looking as the door swung inwards and the dark and dust behind it peeked through. The smell of rust, damp, air. It remembered the first breath of free air and with a sudden rush it felt that same bursting joy again, just to be able to smell the air. Thinking no more of what it was leaving in the room the dog limped through the doorway, pulled the door closed with its teeth, and thinking of food and the outside and cold northern forests it ran, as well as it could, on its way.


End file.
